> how do people feel about the productivity

I think maybe you shouldn't focus on the "productivity" - that's a fairly arbitrary metric, and difficult to measure - it often has more to do with how many bugs you have, how organized you are, and what you are trying to accomplish, how good friends you are with your boss/customer, and very little to do with which editor or what keybindings (or which language, even).

Instead, it is better to think about communication protocols - for a second consider something like the internet - something like handwaves, gestures, while theoretically analog and hence containing infinitely more data, they are very difficult to transcribe, send to the other side of the planet, and interpret.

I'm not saying these things cannot be done, but I imagine the internet would not exist if we had resorted to using thumbs up/down as our method of transferring information between "computers". We used a more appropriate, binary-based, protocol, and now we can send characters and have discussions! Maybe even include a couple hand-wave emojis!

Editors like vim/emacs are similar, they "feel" more productive because they are in some sense, "closer" to the code than a mouse can be. If I mainly am using a mouse (nothing else), then I probably should not be writing code at all and instead should be recording my program with hand waves, or something.

I'm not saying IDE's aren't useful, but that's because programming is neither about those mad FPS skills (mouse) or nor mad text editing skills, they are built to manipulate and mangle symbols, which is what we actually use (for better or worse) to program computers.

That's one reason why I find IDEs (often coupled with an emacs keybinding) mad "productive" - I can mash shortcuts all day long and most of my code writes itself (I'm not even using AI). I'm much closer to communicating with my code/debugger than having to mouse click around. Some of the transforms/translations are sometimes odd, or the UI environment is restrictive, so I'm using the mouse then for those situations. I often, frequently, find myself "out-coding" my peers.

But a good IDE is mostly aimed at being really good at modifying/generating symbols (in the context of a project). Its not very good at text formatting (usually handled by some plugin), for instance. And where it really falls apart, there's no control, i.e. usually it is a complicated product, with lots of pitfalls, speedbumps, "I screwed up and jacked my cache please restart me". And that nixes a lot of the "productivity" gained.

So that remains where a tool like vim/emacs/notepad++ etc shines, when you need to communicate with (roughly structured) text, they won't crash on you, they won't "get in your way", they won't need you to define an AST syntax in order to understand your little mini-language, and, at least of the extensible ones, you can define whatever it is you need or want to. IDEs are usually really, really bad at that sort of thing, if you find yourself needing to do that, you'll often 1) learn to cobble something together in a script 2) learn to cobble together something approaching that in an extensible editor 3) writing a language 4) writing a plugin to write your language in your IDE, to solve whatever it was....