Once you're good at vim you can edit at the speed of thought. Not really much better way to put it. Watching non-vim users edit text is eternally frustrating.
I'd say it's mostly busywork and the placebo effect of thinking it took less time to type a Vim text-editing command than do it in another editor.
And that's for a marginal use case programmers don't fall much into (if you're frequently re-arranging lines or performing the same actions of blocks of text, then you aren't exactly programming).
I'd believe this if it was coming from a vim programmer, but generally speaking this claim does not come from someone who uses vim so doesn't carry much weight. Are you highly proficient at vim and still believe it is a placebo effect?
Even a small improvement in iteration time has a dramatic effect in the way you approach problems. Vim lightens the mental overhead on making text manipulations so that you simply think about what you want to do and your fingers do it.
Totally have to agree with this. I've tried a lot of other editors, but keep coming back to Vim. Drew Neil's "Practical Vim" really helped me increase my leverage on using it well, and its tag line is of course, "Editing Text at the Speed of Thought."
Whenever I find myself repeating something painful, it is almost always solved by searching the resources in the Vim community for solutions.
