I agree that the author seems to be missing some of the beauty of keyboard commands and navigation. Sure Sublime does some things vim can't, but you can do things in vim you certainly can't with mouse-only input. For instance, I use visual block mode dozens of times a day, which allows identical edits to be made to multiple lines simultaneously.
I do complex search and replace very frequently, and almost always on a particular group of lines. In vim that's as simple as typing `:{start},{end}s/{needle}/{replacement}/g<ENTER>`, but in a GUI I have to select the lines with the mouse, likely reselect since I didn't get exactly the right selection the first time, then find the control key to hit <Ctrl-F> before I can even start thinking about my search terms.
I think it comes down to giving you the power to make the edits you will be doing frequently. I find it interesting the author spoke so much about autocomplete and autotab. It's probably just a matter of preference but I've always found that those features get in the way of effective coding. Every time I'm forced to use Visual Studio for something I feel like it's an unloved little kid that keeps piping up: "hey, hey I know what you want to do" but it's always sorely mistaken.
Let me replace on lines 6 through 437 of some text dump the leading curly brace with a function call to turn it into a code file and you'll win my heart, because those are the sorts of transformations that I want my editor helping with.
Actually, Sublimes multi-edit feature is actually pretty good and it's something I'd love to see VIm able to do. What I want to edit isn't always organized into neat vertically aligned blocks.
On the subject of VIm's search and replace, the VIm style regex does drive me nuts, I constantly have to remind myself what needs escaping.
I do complex search and replace very frequently, and almost always on a particular group of lines. In vim that's as simple as typing `:{start},{end}s/{needle}/{replacement}/g<ENTER>`, but in a GUI I have to select the lines with the mouse, likely reselect since I didn't get exactly the right selection the first time, then find the control key to hit <Ctrl-F> before I can even start thinking about my search terms.
I think it comes down to giving you the power to make the edits you will be doing frequently. I find it interesting the author spoke so much about autocomplete and autotab. It's probably just a matter of preference but I've always found that those features get in the way of effective coding. Every time I'm forced to use Visual Studio for something I feel like it's an unloved little kid that keeps piping up: "hey, hey I know what you want to do" but it's always sorely mistaken.
Let me replace on lines 6 through 437 of some text dump the leading curly brace with a function call to turn it into a code file and you'll win my heart, because those are the sorts of transformations that I want my editor helping with.