Most of the efficiency and joy of Vim is in the keybindings. All popular editors have Vim bindings. When first learning (and after), one can spare oneself a lot of pain by just focusing on the bindings.
The key idea is:
- "insert mode" is for inserting text, and that is all.
- "normal mode" is for navigating and manipulating code. Then all the keys can be used for useful things besides inserting text. What keys do is based mostly on easy-to-reachness and menmonics.