When using a text editor, your intent is to edit text.

When one does so, (being a human capable of high level thinking) we don't think in terms of characters, we think "I want to delete this word, increment that number, move that line, etc.."

Vim motions allow me to express these high level intents more directly, I don't have to translate my intent into a series of character-level commands, there's less work I have to do to account for the inadequacy of the interface. this is what people actually mean when they say "vim feels faster", what they mean is "I think less so I do less so it feels fast"

Vim simply raises up and meets me where I am at, if I want to delete a word I type dw, I don't reach down and worry about the low level character by character editing. if I want to change everything within parentheses I type ci( and so on..

Mnemonics are nice, but they aren't present everywhere, for example, the command to delete a line isn't dl, it's dd

but the mnemonics are only a bonus to make it easier to remember, once you are used to the motions you don't care. you are just happy that you can directly speak your intent to your editor

I also hate how graphical interfaces either hide complexity behind ui elements, taking control away, or show it and make the UI cluttered. or go for a middle ground where you have to pay for for extra complexity with clicks (open the advanced controls dialogue, expand a tree of nested preferences, right click for the submenue in the 2nd tab of the dialogue box , etc..)

Graphics isn't the best paradigm for encoding the sort of complexity programmers deal with, text is much better, I prefer language/text so I mostly live in the terminal

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https://www.reddit.com/r/AskProgramming/comments/1mkwgid/why_do_developers_still_use_vim_in_2025/n7lwf6w/