> For the first 1-2 years of your Vim usage you will be much less efficient than your current editor because of the odd yet lovable key bindings. After about 2 years you will be proficient.

Really? For me it was closer to 2 months rather than 2 years. 2 months is still a significant chunk of time to invest in learning a text editor, but given that it's one of the most used pieces of software, it's worth it.

> followed by knowing some cool tricks that you use in 1% of your daily workflow.

If that's the case, then you are not learning the right tricks. Vim has a tonne of different way of moving and editing text. Most people don't use the majority of those. Instead, they find the subset that is most useful to them and ignore the rest.

> The argument that Vim is more efficient is dubious and untestable.

It is most certainly testable. Whether or not it has been tested is another question. Is anyone aware of any serious usability studies for Vim?

> but developers are commonly on machines where the trackpad is a micro-hand movement away.

Maybe it's just me, but I find using a trackpad a lot slower than using a mouse.

> The point of a mouse is to make arbitrary on screen jumps efficient, and it’s very good at doing that. Don’t you ever think you can beat a mouse. Only in very few edge cases will it even matter.

I agree that mouse is the way to go when you want to move arbitrarily around the screen. But when programming that's rarely the case. Normally, you want to move to a specific place (a particular line, the definition of the class/function, a specific place in the document). Vim allows you to do these things efficiently.

> Consider that Vim has been around since 1991. Pathogen, the first widely used, known, and celebrated path manager making plugin management possible, was released in 2008!

This is irrelevant. The important thing that, right now, Vim has a decent way of managing plugins. Though I agree -- it's embarrassing how long it took to get there.

> Vim out of the box is awful. I can’t stress how bad of an editor vanilla Vim is. Plugins are essential to make Vim usable.

This is partly true. You definitely want to customize Vim before you use it for any serious development work. But it's not like vanilla Vim is completely unusable. I ssh into servers and edit config files and write short scripts all the time. I find that vanilla Vim is more than adequate for that. Besides it's not like setting up Vim on a new system needs to be a lot of effort -- once you have your perfect setup, just stick it on GitHub. Then configuring Vim on a new system is just a 'git clone'.

> Most Vim plugins haven’t been converted to Github projects yet. Vim Scripts acts as a featureless host, which is fine, except that it doesn’t offer any benefits. It has a nasty interface, and encourages the use of the Vim Wiki for project management

No argument here...

> Ah, Vimscript. It’s bad. And yet we’re stuck with it.

Yes, I agree. But most Vim users don't really need to deal with it, as you yourself point out:

> Most experienced Vimmers I know don’t know any Vimscript

> Finding the right Vim plugins is like being in an exclusive club. It gets better around year 2 of your journey, then worse around year 3, then…

Yup, I have to agree with this one. Though there are number of resources that recommend good plugin sets; and there things like python-mode that integrate several plugins for a specific purpose.

> Everyone remaps Leader from backslash to comma.

I don't.

> Do you know what the suggested way to work well with multiple files in Vim is? It’s the arglist.

Never used it. Fuf works pretty well for me.

> Vim Is Bad By Design™ 2: GUI

I really don't get this entire section. Vim uses a fixed width font because it is a programmer's editor, and not using fixed with fonts when writing code or editing configs is madness. If you want fancy typesetting, you're using Vim for something it wasn't designed for.

RE Vim being ugly. It kind of is out of the box. But powerline (which the post mentions) + a custom theme + a custom font solve that.

RE Vim lacking GUI. Yes that's true and that is by design. If you want a rich GUI and would prefer to use the mouse to navigate between files, select menu options etc, Vim isn't for you.

> Vim is Oddly Bad at Indenting

Indentation preferences vary wildly, even within the same language; Vim provides the tools to set up the indentation you need. I agree that out-of-the-box support for some common languages could be improved.

Vim is definitely not for every one, but for those willing to invest the effort (and it really isn't as much as this post makes it out to be), it can be a very powerful, flexible, and efficient editor. I have never used SubilmeText (though heard a lot of good things about it) so can't really comment to what it would be a better/worse alternative to Vim. This post doesn't seem to address to what extent SublimeText solves the issues outlined for Vim, and it specifically should be used instead of Vim (as opposed to Emacs, PSpad, UltraEdit, etc..)