As a programmer, your text editor is your weapon. With keyboard as conduit you manipulate what you see on screen to realise your thoughts. By honing your skill at wielding a text editor, writing code can become a more fluent process, allowing your thoughts to flow uninterrupted.
The paradigm of modal text editing with Vim is being able to edit at the speed of thought. By using compose-able hotkeys and different modes Vim allows you to move your cursor and achieve your immediate editing task in just a few keystrokes. Commanding Vim is like speaking a language. By chaining different key combos together, you can instruct Vim to manipulate the text in any way you intend - and all without using the mouse.
You may not think it, but using the mouse to edit text is awfully slow. You can think of it as an O(log n) algorithm - you move your mouse in the direction you want, and poll: "are you at the target yet?". This repeats, closing the distance each time, until finally you