As a developer I'm not sitting down an typing constantly like some bad Hollywood "hacker" montage, or a court reporter. So preemptively optimizing a tiny subset of my workflow really doesn't offer much value.
Contrast that with something like Chrome Debugging for VS Code[0] or GitLens[1] that are fitting into what I actually spend a lot of time doing, therefore improving productivity. If my typing was 50% faster my overall productivity would be maybe 5% better, because that just isn't a bottleneck.
I feel like the vim/emacs crowd experiences professional programming VERY differently to anywhere I've worked. Myself nor any of my colleagues are just type-type-type. I spend more time reading and writing OneNote documentation files (specs, etc) than I do writing code. I spend more time in meetings than I do writing code. I spend more time debugging and testing than I do writing code.
And I think, you're not entirely honest about your work. More often than we'd like, we do just type in multiple variations of the same boilerplate code.
It's the unglorious part of our work, the part that we're paid far too much for, since you can't quite ask a secretary to do it.
So, it's seldomly acknowledged that we do this stuff, but it's not even particularly uncommon with database and GUI code often being mostly that.
There you are mostly bottlenecked by your typing speed, not by how much you need to think.
As for your argument that typing speed is not the most important thing about a text editor, that it's its tooling instead: Emacs has a thousand features beside text editing, while vim has a thousand extensions to add those features. I'm sure, if you actually used one of these text editors you'd just as well have anecdotes of things you feel are important which you don't have on the other platforms.
Off-topic: OneNote is probably going the way of the Dodo by the way. Microsoft Office 2019 and onwards will not ship with it. You can comtinue to use OneNote 2016 for a while still, but it's eventually not going to get security patches anymore.
Microsoft does provide what they consider a continuation as a UWP app, but as it stands you can't use that without uploading all your notes to Microsoft's servers, so hardly usable in a company with any sort of sense for confidentiality and data protection.
Would you agree that touch-typing is a useful (or even necessary) skill for a programmer? I'd say it is, because it allows you to type without having to interrupt your thoughts with the process of finding where each key is.
For me, at least, learning vim has the same kind of benefit. It's not about getting characters into the editor faster, it's about being able to manipulate text without having to think about it.
As a developer I'm not sitting down an typing constantly like some bad Hollywood "hacker" montage, or a court reporter. So preemptively optimizing a tiny subset of my workflow really doesn't offer much value.
Contrast that with something like Chrome Debugging for VS Code[0] or GitLens[1] that are fitting into what I actually spend a lot of time doing, therefore improving productivity. If my typing was 50% faster my overall productivity would be maybe 5% better, because that just isn't a bottleneck.
I feel like the vim/emacs crowd experiences professional programming VERY differently to anywhere I've worked. Myself nor any of my colleagues are just type-type-type. I spend more time reading and writing OneNote documentation files (specs, etc) than I do writing code. I spend more time in meetings than I do writing code. I spend more time debugging and testing than I do writing code.
[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/12/20/chrome-debugg...
[1] https://github.com/eamodio/vscode-gitlens