The interface is modal editing, which, yes, takes some getting used to. The payoff is that you get a kind of programming language for text editing. Rather than memorizing ctrl+shift+alt-style keybinds, you decompose stuff into chainable actions.

Have you ever played a video game, be it with kbd+mouse or gamepad, and realize you’re doing a bunch of stuff without actually consciously thinking about what buttons you’re pressing? That’s what working in editors like Vim or (my fav) Helix feels like.

since interface has been designed to be as unfriendly as possible

No, it hasn't.

It (well, vi, which vim is a clone of) has been designed to be a possible interface on a keyboard that doesn't have arrow keys or other modifier keys than shift. There aren't that many ways to program a visual text editor when those are your constraints.

That it's more productive once you know it is a side-effect.

It’s a specialist tool. You can say the same thing about any specialist tool. Why should CNC machine tools exist if they’re so hard to use and take a lot of training and are dangerous in the hands of untrained people?

Vim is actually highly ergonomic; you can do everything with a minimum of keystrokes without moving a hand away to a mouse or touchpad or oven the arrow keys. If that's worth the time investment to learn it, is a highly subjective question. But I’d say it's a lot easier than many people think.

fluency. languages are hard to learn but when you know them you communicate better. same as touch-typing, or mobas.

It's not "designed to be as unfriendly as possible", it's designed to be exactly what you configure it to be, that's why I love it. Every keymap, every screen position, every worflow, the way it searches through lines and files names, everything was configured by me, so whenever I do something in my editor it always make absolute sense for me, because it was literally made for me.

If you get me to someone else's neovim config I would probably be absolutely lost because it's a very unique experience for each person, some people like to bloat it out with plugins others like to keep it bare minimum and so on.

One biggest lie abput vim is the productivity, it doesn't make you that much faster in comparison to any other editor if you take the time to learn the keymaps from them, the real strong point of neovim is having an editor that is absolutely tailor made for you in a way you cannot achieve in OOB editors.

Learn Vim motions and use a plugin for another IDE. You are losing so much time and mental energy using a mouse for coding. You can also use something like NVChad with NVim and have a Vim that looks more like modern ides.

Friendly is useful in an application you use once a week. Anything you want to work with daily, like a text editor, needs to be efficient.

In terms of command line editors, vim is extremely powerful and relatively easy to get started with, once you know how to get into insert mode and then save/quit. nano/pico are easier to learn but less powerful, and emacs is probably more powerful than vim, and more daunting to learn. Also, vim is installed on almost all systems, so there's not really any extra work to get started using it.

My preferred text editors are Neovim and Kate

Kate has some convenient features, mainly the easy GUI. Neovim is the CLI text editor that I find works best for me.

I learned (neo)vim this last year. It really wasn't that bad. You need to learn like maybe a dozen hotkeys to get going, but after that you can do :h <topic> for everything else. And it's not even like you lose full functionality of your mouse, at least neovim supports a lot of mouse movements

The cult of vim feels very superior for being able to plow through its user-hostility

And even if you decide to go for modal editors, Helix is a lot better out of the box

Okay, I'm going to use vim, and you get to use vim's predecessor, ed. I'm sure you won't mind, since vim is soooooo user-unfriendly! Right?