[Kylotan]

But the same could be said for learning Esperanto. I spent plenty of time learning vi keystrokes at my last job, and ultimately you're just memorising things that other editors have on menus.

A common mistake that vi and emacs fans make is to think that someone who uses a windowed editor is mouse-reliant. I can reindent a paragraph of code with three or four keystrokes in most of my Windows-based editors too.

When used appropriately, the mouse is more efficient than the keyboard. And vice-versa. The difference is that in one situation, you have that choice, in another situation, you don't.

I don't doubt there's some cases which you find a lot more efficient, but all the examples I ever hear are of convoluted things that I need to do no more than once every 6 months in the usual course of coding. Quite often the people using the 'friendly' editors don't dream of these operations because they never found themselves performing them. I seriously doubt that the time spent learning these things in the first place is worth the investment for most people.