I find being good at vim makes exploration much easier though. Being able to use Ag to populate a quick fix list is way faster for me than ctrl-f plus clicking

I find being good at vim makes exploration much easier though. Being able to use Ag to populate a quick fix list is way faster for me than ctrl-f plus clicking through every option. And being able to go up and down the movement stack let's me retrace how I navigated to where I am right now, in a way that isn't possible in many editors. Tools like just searching through open buffers let me use search in large codebases without having to wait forever for results. So for me being good at an editor is more than just being able to make fast edits (although that's definitely a benefit too). And even if I only saved a few minutes a day, over several years that is a lot of time saved, without much investment. It's really easy to get started with vim, get comfortable with the basics in an hour or two, and then just get better by using it every day. Then you can slowly introduce features that save you time. Just setting up fzf and ag has probably saved me several minutes a day vs. using vscode search.