Matthias Beyer published two tips which according to him “are very critical when talking about speed when using vim”. I beg to differ and want to give my reasons.

Yes, leader mappings are important but not to gain speed but to increase the available mapping space by one additional dimension. For example, I map :Make<CR> to F6, whereas he maps it to <Leader>m. Speed gain in my opinion: zero. Moreover, there is some truth in it that “leader maps are pretty lame”.

Matthias’ next tip was: “don’t use the arrow keys!”. I agree but replacing them by using hjkl exclusively won’t cut it. You gain a little bit by staying in the home row but at the end of the day you still drag your cursor around one character/line after another. By far, my main navigation speedups come from moving by words with b, e and w, by paragraphs with { and }, by half-screens with Ctrl+u and Ctrl+d. However, navigation only makes up a tiny fraction of a typical Vim day: I gain a lot more by using Vim’s grammar to its full extent.

So here is my Vim tip of the day: learn it as good as you can.