> every time I think about learning vim I always go back to the argument that it's just a tool to get a job done Tools are tools; their value is not so much wi

> every time I think about learning vim I always go back to the argument that it's just a tool to get a job done Tools are tools; their value is not so much with the features they carry but with our abilities to utilize them with joy. If someone perfects their workflows using notepad.exe, telling them something is wrong with that is like forcing a grown-up to "eat properly" even though they've been holding their spoon since childhood in their left hand, like a pencil. If you try, however, to focus not on the tools themselves but the big ideas they convey, that might change your perspective on many things. At some point, after many cycles of frustration, amazement, inspiration, and awe, you will learn to appreciate certain ideas. You are right to admire Vim - its main idea of modality is a wonderful, beautiful, powerful, and pragmatic model. I, for example, even though these days rarely use Neovim itself, consider myself "a diehard vimmer". I use that model everywhere - in my terminal, my editor, my browser, system-wide - with my window manager. For example, I control the volume, playback, and speed of my videos and my music with home-row keys. The incredible instinct and dexterity one can build over time can be mind-blowing. It's not about "building a discipline to not touch the mouse or arrow keys"; it's about realization that you can do without them - "do not try to bend the spoon...", etc. Some other tools also exhibit the use of great ideas. Emacs builds on the cornerstone of a different, yet incredibly powerful idea - the idea of practical notation for lambda calculus, which is known as Lisp. Lisp probably can be crowned as one of the most important ideas in computer science. Understanding it makes it hard to think of anything more influential than Lisp. Any programmer who dismisses the idea of Lisp based on one concrete implementation of it is misguided. VSCode carries the idea of an editor built on top of a browser, which turns out to be not so bad of an idea, after all. Cursor - the idea of tight LLMs integration, etc. And it's not just the editors and IDEs; take any of these and you find some beautiful ideas behind them - Unix, Git, Make, Jupyter, React, Docker, SQLite, Org-mode, etc. Each of these tools embodies a fundamental idea that has proven influential and valuable in computing. Borrow good ideas, try them, practice them, implement them into your life, expand upon them. Understanding the core of the ideas is empowering. And often it liberates you from the burden of specific implementations - i.e., you don't have to use Neovim to appreciate the idea of Vim.