[estsauver]

Sure, there are definitely some folks who are excellent in those languages with Vim. But when you think about the amount of time that's required to make Vim comply, the amount of mental state that's required to manage the things that could have been taken care of by an IDE, I can't help but challenge the idea that there's nothing possibly better than tools.

By analogy, I don't believe that a chainsaw is either a bad tool or that it's impossible to make good art with a chainsaw, but I do believe most marble sculptures would be better suited to a chisel.

[weliketocode]

When comparing vim and intellij,

vim is a lot closer to the chisel, while intellij is closer to the chainsaw.

[estsauver]

I think you're missing the point I'm making, they're different tools that serve different purposes:

IntelliJ is really great at managing large, statically typed, Java/Scala/Enterprisey frameworks. I have never seen a vim setup that effectively generates and manages javabeans. I have never seen a vim setup that manages an xml spring configuration file correctly (or even understands how to resolve xml namespaces and validate them.)

But vim is very lightweight, it's incredibly customizable, it's adaptable. It is faster for editing text. If you're writing a new language that doesn't have integration with IntelliJ's language protocol, it's probably better. If you need to jump into the source code of other libraries to understand what's going on, Vim tends not to be good at that sort of thing.

Regardless of which you think is the chisel and which is the chainsaw, there are some software engineers trying to cut down trees and some trying to make marble statues. The "all software engineers who don't use my tools are fools!" mentality doesn't make sense.

[weliketocode]

No, I believe I understood the point you're trying to make, but I disagree with it.

I've worked directly with several VIM devs on Enterprisey frameworks who were not held back by their lack of Intellij.