[twunde]

Fully agree. Each type of editor excels at different use-cases.

vim/emacs. Once you get up to speed, you can type or move around faster than with other editors. The main reason to use these are because you're already spending most of your time in the terminal because you're a) working in an ecosystem like rails where most of the tooling is run from the terminal b) doing sysadmin tasks like editing config files, running ansible or otherwise writing code over ssh. That's the sweet spot. Once you become comfortable there are ways to extend the editors to basically give them ide-like functionality.

Gui-based text editors like Atom, Notepad++, etc. These are the simplest editors to get up and running and have a low level of bloat. You usually don't need to spend time waiting for it to load whereas most IDEs take 1-5 minutes to load up fully. The main reason to use these is ease of use. If you don't need the complexity of vim or an ide, use this.

IDEs work best when you are dealing with large codebases, especially if you're not familiar with the codebase or the available functions. I personally maintain ~600k lines of mostly undocumented code at work. It uses a custom framework and was contributed to by dozens of developers. There an IDE is probably the best choice because it will catch errors (made by you or past developers), it will autocomplete function names and best of all, there is a jump to definition feature so you can quickly trace through code paths. After two years of working here I can use vim without too much of a dropoff

[capote]

Whenever someone gets too preachy about Vim or Emacs, I always imagine them trying to work on a full .NET project with Vim. Is this even possible? I can't imagine.