> I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor.

I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent to saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will pay dividends over the long run. The more efficiently the text editor allows you to do tasks, the more time you have to think about other tasks.

I think that it's wrong to assume that vi is the only route to deep muscle memory. Heavy mouse users develop blindingly fast Fitts’ Law targeting. And if you need essential simplicity, they have far fewer commands.

Bill Joy, the original author of vi, saw the vi commands as a problem, not a solution [1]:

    The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing.

Yeah; I have a minimal vimrc with cursorline, wrap, line number, some other option to make arrow keys jump to next line from end. I set a different colorscheme on each machine when I have to deal with multiple machines. That's it.

I never edited the default config much.

But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.

I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.

P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.

> that muscle memory

Once in a while I will mistakenly dump a string of keystrokes into insert mode or another application. That literal output always amazes me because the construction of those strings is so far removed from my brain's "main thread".

The inverse is if I try to write a helper function or explain to someone else how I did something they observed and I need to methodically document each action. It's like trying to describe how to walk or something.

I functionned this way for a very long time, plain vim with 5-6 options in .vimrc, no plugin (aside for the very occasionnal syntax highlighting like jinja.vim iirc). I kept this setup for more than 10 years mainly to stay compatible with multiple systems (in my case Solaris/Illumos, Linux, MacOS and even Windows).

But I made the switch to nvim / LazyVim. And it is actually pretty good. I had in mind those endless hours of config and lua scripting. At the end of the day all I needed actually was to remove a plugin (folke, which messes with my 's' key) and learn to use the package manager to setup the languages I wanted.

Having things like GrugFAR or lazygit at the tip of my finger is actually a quality of life improvement. I could do without those for sure but they fit my workflow and muscle memory well.

Still wish there was something better for ansible ; I should have gone with pyinfra with my current job's project but I only learned about it after writing 12k LoCs of ansible :'(

Likewise, I'm also not very demanding of my text editor. I used vi on any *nix systems and Notepad (the original one, not the new bloated monstrosity) on Windows for most of my work. Navigation, basic editing, and searching are probably all I need.

Same. I barely edit default configs. I also mostly use emulators provided by whatever ide I use.