> I never felt typing speed or special text transformation shortcuts being my limiting factor.

You don't because the purpose of all the actions you take while editing text is to not think about it. As a non-vim users, you have trained yourself to not think about the time you spent editing text. You want to move an object of options from one file to another file and move it to another object (something which I did moments ago), then the moment you come to the conclusion that you need to make that change, you start using your mouse, select the object, Ctrl-C, then move to the other file, Ctrl-V, and press the shortcut to auto format. But you don't think about it any more than you think about switching windows when moving from one app to the other.

In vim too I probably think about it no more than you do about your own text editing, but with vim, I don't press modifier keys, I don't reach out for mouse, and opening a file is the same speed as IntelliJ (an editor my coworkers use), using Ctrl-P, if not faster. Traversing files is much faster. Splitting screen and navigating is a billion times faster than what you can achieve on any of these editors. All without using the mouse or modifiers.

But these are only small benefits when compared to the biggest difference I've seen between Vim/Emacs users vs non-Vim/Emacs users. Take for instance, few minutes ago I was doing pair programming with my coworkers, and I noticed that there were thousands of productivity shortcuts that he wouldn't use, and he is not the only one, majority of non-vim using people I've met, fail to make use of these productivity enhancements.

* Pressing Ctrl-C/X without selecting text just cut/copy the whole line.
* Pressing double click on a line selects the word, triple click selects the whole line (or paragraph in text)
* Using Alt-Tab to switch windows
* Ctrl-Backspace deletes the whole word/token
* Ctrl+Arrow key for navigation
* Split Screen, nearly all their editors support split screen functionality, but opening multiple files in multiple panes is like crazy person talk

Even with this minor experience I have with their editors, I look like a magician using their IDE. Not to mention how slow their editor is while trying to help me by auto-completing. I was done typing the name of the class before their auto-completion kicked in. You call that slight convenience of marginal utility, but to

My point is that, productivity enhancements is a desire people have, which makes these people to move towards Vim/Emacs. For the people who don't even use Ctrl-A to select the whole text, they fail to see what they're really capable of doing on their editor.

> As I've said, I've used Vim for 15+ years (still do, a decade after every time I'm in a shell). I've known all these shortcuts, used them, etc. Haven't seen it make any great difference in that respect.

Considering you complaint about speed of navigating between files, I highly doubt that you know "all these shortcuts", because even if you do, the philosophy of vim is to keep optimizing your workflow, so you create a shortcut for shortcuts. I think it would be a cool idea to hold competitions where two people are given a codebase, and their own completely configured editor on the same machine with same processes running and then they are asked to do a number of tasks, like open UserController.js, UserView.html, UserService.js and refactor a variable and change some data.