"esoteric" and "cryptic"? Have you ever learned vim keybindings? They improve my productivity by a nontrivial percentage. Tens of thousands of other developers have the same opinion.
Unlike Atom and Sublime, vim is far more performant and is available on every machine I SSH into. I'd drop into an IDE (with vim keybindings) for a large Java or C++ project, but vim wins every other time.
You should give learning vim a try at some point if you haven't already. It's a steep learning curve, but it all pays off. Typing vim movements feels like playing a piano.
I used emacs (so I use the emacs key bindings), then I moved onto SublimeText and never looked back. I totally agree that vim/emacs like keybindings can improve productivity. But many editors can easily support this, so you don't have to succumb to these editors like vim/emacs where everything is then complicated when you really just want the keybindings.
P.s here's some Elisp for all the emacks hackers. Very useful, feel free to use (;
I once thought the same thing. Then I started working with in the terminal environment on a regular basis. It forced me to learn vim as an IDE. I'm surprised to say that once I got in a groove with it I find regular text editors painfully slow in comparison. I employ vim bindings to intellij my Web browser and anywhere else possible. I challenge you to watch this video, spend a few days trying it out and report back to this comment https://youtu.be/5r6yzFEXajQ
