"I've played FPS games where I had to target something the size of < 10 pixels, in less than a second, and the need to move my mouse from one end of the mouse pad to the other."
Do you type with just one hand? Because that's what you'd need to do to replicate that performance while coding.
If you type with both hands, now you have to add in the time it takes you to move one hand from the keyboard to the mouse, make the mouse motion (which could be far across the screen) and then back to the keyboard, repeating that cycle for every single operation which involves the mouse.
Meanwhile, someone who knows vim well and is not reliant on the mouse can type with both hands and only has to move their fingers.
Even if that's true (which is doubtful, as the motion to press a key is much shorter than to move one's arm all the way off a keyboard to the mouse), then you still have the additional time it takes to move the mouse to where it needs to go, and then the time it takes to move your arm back to the keyboard.
There's no way that's going to be as fast. It's also going to be a lot more tiring, if you do that a lot, than merely moving your fingers.
Sure, but you usually have to press a bunch of keys in just the right sequence to do the equivalent with the keyboard.
Some things are quicker to do with the mouse and some things are quicker to do using keyboard shortcuts. I don't understand why people take such absolutist positions on this.
My arm doesn't get tired from moving a few inches to grab the mouse.
"you usually have to press a bunch of keys in just the right sequence to do the equivalent with the keyboard"
Compared to a veteran vim/emacs user, you'd to do a whole ton of mouse movements to get the same effect of a few keystrokes.
"Some things are quicker to do with the mouse and some things are quicker to do using keyboard shortcuts."
The only things I've found to be quicker to do with the mouse are doing things like drawing in Photoshop/GIMP/Inkscape, or interacting with GUI applications which don't have keyboard shortcuts for most of their functions. Text editing and coding, on the other hand, tends to be much faster, sometimes exponentially faster, than the mouse.
This can not be overstated. I haven't seen many GUI type programmers programming in my live, but none of them was faster than "slow". I die of impatience when I watch them edit.
Do you type with just one hand? Because that's what you'd need to do to replicate that performance while coding.
If you type with both hands, now you have to add in the time it takes you to move one hand from the keyboard to the mouse, make the mouse motion (which could be far across the screen) and then back to the keyboard, repeating that cycle for every single operation which involves the mouse.
Meanwhile, someone who knows vim well and is not reliant on the mouse can type with both hands and only has to move their fingers.