Yeah, if you amortize your coding output over a significant period of time, it'll be like a couple hundred lines a day at most. In fact, even as few as 200 line

Yeah, if you amortize your coding output over a significant period of time, it'll be like a couple hundred lines a day at most. In fact, even as few as 200 lines would likely put your in the upper decile of programmers as measured in LOCs/day. I didn't believe this actually, but at Google there's a dashboard where you can look at your (and everyone else's) stats wrt lines added/deleted/changed, and it doesn't lie. The point being, you could easily type this many lines per day using Morse code. That said, I think Carmack is being overly dismissive here. Sometimes you end up in a situation where not knowing (or having) certain editor features results in a ton of tedious manual editing. I know a few tricks to avoid those situations in my work, and have a few bookmarks to help with the rest. I think this is the right balance to have - do know features which you find use for at least once a month, even if they are obscure, and know where to find the rest.