The advantage of Vim is efficiency and speed. The disadvantage is that it has a longer learning curve.
For something like editing text, as a programmer you do this endlessly - it is absolutely worth it to be ruthlessly efficient at this, even if you have to pay effort learning it.
But for, say, installing a plugin in your text editor... that's something you do a handful of times a month. The mouse is much more adaptable and easy to use, even if you give up accuracy.
This way, you can be efficient at editing text without having to learn keybindings for a bunch of misc things that you do rarely.
> The advantage of Vim is efficiency and speed. The disadvantage is that it has a longer learning curve.
I'm not disagreeing with this comment all, just throwing my anecdata at the somewhat squishy "longer" word in that sentence.
For me, I went cold-turkey with vim (my employer wanted me coding on both Mac and Windows at more or less simultaneously; I figured it would be a useful investment of time to learn a single set of hotkeys that I could use on both systems and get into my muscle memory, rather than trying to keep Xcode hotkeys and Visual Studio hotkeys straight in my head)
I stopped using literally any other text editor or IDE either at work or at home, just to try to learn vim as fast as possible, and spent a bunch of recreational time playing VimGolf.
As I'd expected, it was catastrophic for my productivity initially, but I reached a basic proficiency within five days; I got back to my normal development cadence quickly enough that my lead didn't even notice I had taken time to teach myself to use a "difficult" text editor; I just had one week where I was slightly behind schedule, before catching back up and getting ahead during the following week, where my skills improved even further.
It definitely is a longer learning curve before you can say that you've "mastered" vim than most other editors. But you can reach a basic competence equivalent to other (non-emacs) text editors pretty quickly; it's just that there's still a lot more useful functionality you can learn after that point.
Good for people who like the ergonomics of VSCode (one-click plugin installs, everything simply "just works" out of the box) with the ergonomics of Vim (modal editing, speed).
This. I'll go to VSCode from Neovim kicking and screaming, but frankly VSCode + a good Vim plugin is the pragmatic choice for most people out there looking for a Vim-like editor.
