His advice is good; I went through the "don't touch the arrow keys" and "you don't need the mouse phase" a fairly long ago. It did help me eventually get very efficient in Vim but I had to sepnd a lot of free time doing it and there were months where if I was at work I ignored all the "good" advice and used the arrows, the mouse, special keys like PgUp and whatever else was needed to get the job done.

Years later I showed a younger coworker the Windows version of GVim - it comes with an "Easy" mode that makes it behave more like notepad. He loved it, used it all the time. He never did get very good at using it in Unix mode but I can't fault him for that. Most of his work was on Windows and he was quite productive so that was good enough for me.

TL;DR:

Not like Textmate. Tried vi before, gave up. Tried again, gave up. Tried to do real work expecting it to be Textmate, gave up.

I see a pattern here.

..I don't. Did you read the article? He doesn't say not to use VIM.

Don't get me wrong, I use vi a fair amount, and for a long long time. But I'd not go out of my way to use it, there are plenty of better options when you're not at a command prompt. I draw the line at using emacs though ;-)

Neither did I.

Only that he tried multiple times and gave up, with the primary reason being mostly "It isn't something I'm familiar with"