IME more "mechanical" means definitely promote code familiarity. For some languages I use vim as my primary editor -- generally anything frontend. OTOH, at leas

IME more "mechanical" means definitely promote code familiarity. For some languages I use vim as my primary editor -- generally anything frontend. OTOH, at least for me, I'm definitely a lot slower with pure vim when working with java. I use intellij for that. However, i use IdeaVim to get the vim key bindings, so 80% of the time I'm actually still using my IDE very similarly to how I use vim, so I think your point regarding "mechanical" means still holds. My biggest complaint is mainly that I wish I could access more of my IDE's features with just vim key bindings. Sometimes when I'm really and truly stuck, I will open up a java file in vim. In those situations, the forced slow-down is actually an advantage, and I get a much deeper understanding of what I'm looking at. I can't code well this way (perhaps that's on me), but it can be a powerful aid in debugging at times.