Between the awkward file navigation and the feeling of building my own editor from the ground up, I just never found it worthwhile to fully commit to Vim. So I

Between the awkward file navigation and the feeling of building my own editor from the ground up, I just never found it worthwhile to fully commit to Vim. So I work in VSCode in my day job. What I did take from those efforts, though, was Vim's text navigation key bindings. They are a joy to use and most text editors have some sort of emulator for them. The beauty is in the chording, almost all of which maps to easily remembered mnemonics. Delete everything between quotes? Use di". Change curly brackets to square? Change surround, or cs{[. Once you've gotten used to switching between move and edit modes, you can layer these in bit by bit. At a certain point it becomes second nature and you do feel like you can edit code at the speed of thought. It's a powerful feeling.