The power of the vi-family is that this generalizes consistently. Want to replace everything from here to the next comma? 'ct,TYPE STUFF HERE' I'm not a very accurate mouser, so with a GUI editor without sufficient vi-ness, that means I need to use the mouse to drag a selection, make sure I don't also grab the tiny comma, then start typing. So annoying.

> The power of the vi-family is that this generalizes consistently.

Absolutely! It takes learning relatively few command/motion combos before you are really cooking. The commands are fairly composable as well. I rarely find myself without being able to find a command that can't do what I want. To be fair it takes some time to learn all the commands but eventually you just forget about it and it becomes automatic.

I can't believe people actually use their mouse to select text.

Visual mode is way more practical because you don't always need to edit a word, you might need to edit a few words and/or things that are not words. I always use visual mode to see clearly what I'm changing.