The Vim editing language — hjkl, operators, motions, text objects. Learning Vim motions is the single best investment for editor speed.
Vim motions are the editing language built into Vim and Neovim. They are not really a tool you install — they are a skill you learn — but they have become fundamental enough to how I write code that they deserve their own entry.
The core insight is that editing text is a grammar. You have operators (d for delete, c for change, y for yank), motions (w for word, $ for end of line, f for find character), and text objects (iw for inner word, i" for inside quotes, it for inside tag). Combining them with a multiplier gives you enormous precision at high speed.
d3w deletes the next three words. ci" changes everything inside the nearest quotes. Vap selects a paragraph. Once these become muscle memory, you stop moving your hands to the arrow keys, stop reaching for the mouse, and start thinking in terms of what you want to accomplish rather than how to move the cursor there.
Every major editor has a Vim mode — VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains IDEs, and even browser text areas with extensions. Learning Vim motions is portable. It is the one investment that pays off across every tool you will ever use.