I don't have much experience with Vim, so I don't really have the whole picture here, but I never understood why the examples of Vim's usefulness was appealing. They all seem to be examples of how you can edit text very efficiently, but that never seemed to be a problem for me. When I program, typing speed is never the bottleneck - I spend most of my time thinking about how to implement something, testing it, and debugging it. The actual typing part is a fairly small portion of it. Letting me input the text with like 25% increased speed doesn't seem worth the overhead of internalizing such a complex system. I'd rather work in an environment with good debugging tools and autocomplete system (but maybe those aren't incompatible with Vim; again, I'm not too experienced with using it).
Perhaps it depends on the type of work. I imagine some types of programming require more typing than others. I could see typing efficiency being really beneficial for front end web stuff. I mostly work on game engine things, and rarely does my speed-of-thinking-of-things-to-type exceed my typing speed.
Yeah, I also think it depends on what you're doing.
I'm currently in the middle of writing an application with Java, which is more or less just a GUI to enter things into a database. And both, the GUI code and the database code, is 90% just spelling out the obvious.
I mean, for the GUI code, context-sensitive autocompletion is still important, no doubt, even just so I don't have to type out "pnlInputTimeSpan" and similar all the time, but the naming is relatively consistent, so I could certainly imagine just typing it.
And there is something to be said as well about actually just typing things out, rather than also interacting with the GUI of your IDE. Remembering the name correctly and typing it, to me, feels closer to the core thought process than interacting with the GUI of my IDE.
Lastly, many people tell themselves they edit text all day long, so whatever helps to speed that up, even if it's just a few percent, is going to be worth it in the long run.
Perhaps it depends on the type of work. I imagine some types of programming require more typing than others. I could see typing efficiency being really beneficial for front end web stuff. I mostly work on game engine things, and rarely does my speed-of-thinking-of-things-to-type exceed my typing speed.