I put VIM in the title because 1) it's got a recognizable identity to pull in readers and, 2) I use VIM. But, in a weird and almost recursive way, editor wars are kinda like language wars. If it gets you that 5% (or more) boost, great! But, the differences between them often washes out.
Yeah, the most important thing is to know your tools of choice really, really well. vim never made me more productive—being able to do what I needed to in it quickly did. I could just as easily have used emacs (had I learned that first), or atom (had that been around back then) or <insert favorite editor/ide here>.
The had-I-learned-it-first concept is something I didn't mention, but do think is important. And, often it works in an inhibiting way. With an IDEA-like rich IDEs -- which I think is a great tool, esp with VIM bindings! -- you get such a boost from things like good contextual auto-complete, that you never feel the need to learn it more deeply.
This way you can also attract furious members from the church of emacs ;)
But learning Vi is extremely useful, because many editors/IDEs feature a Vi Plugin:
Visual Studio, Qt, Eclipse, Xcode, Atom, IntelliJ and of course Emacs. Learning the basic Emacs shortcuts is likewise useful for terminal (though some shells also have a Vi mode!)
> [4] Or, emacs. Or, really, any other tool that you 1) use constantly; 2) is almost universally applicable; and, 3) makes you more productive.
Nice to see consideration for other tools in a piece like this.