I agree. The challenge is neither simple nor reasonable. Don't get me wrong: he (and anyone else) has every right to want to be productive, but it's odd to think that switching editors should not lead to some drop in productivity. Editors are important to programmers. A baseball player wouldn't expect a different glove or bat to immediately be as productive as a familiar one.
Katz's counter example is that he "didn’t really have to put up with a huge amount of pain when switching to Textmate for the first time. In fact, it was downright pleasant." Note, however, that (based on what he says about his TextMate usage) all he every did with TextMate was type text. He didn't use snippets or commands much. As he says, "When I really thought about it, Textmate wasn’t doing all that much for me. It was a glorified Notepad which had working syntax highlighting and understand where to put the cursor when I hit enter (most of the time)." So TextMate didn't hurt, but it also did help. In my mind Vim is likely to do both: hurt at first (it's a big adjustment), and help a lot later.
(That said, I don't think there's anything wrong with learning Vim more gradually, as he's trying now. But his initial demand of "no significant drop in productivity" isn't as reasonable as he seems to think.)
Katz's counter example is that he "didn’t really have to put up with a huge amount of pain when switching to Textmate for the first time. In fact, it was downright pleasant." Note, however, that (based on what he says about his TextMate usage) all he every did with TextMate was type text. He didn't use snippets or commands much. As he says, "When I really thought about it, Textmate wasn’t doing all that much for me. It was a glorified Notepad which had working syntax highlighting and understand where to put the cursor when I hit enter (most of the time)." So TextMate didn't hurt, but it also did help. In my mind Vim is likely to do both: hurt at first (it's a big adjustment), and help a lot later.
(That said, I don't think there's anything wrong with learning Vim more gradually, as he's trying now. But his initial demand of "no significant drop in productivity" isn't as reasonable as he seems to think.)