| Honestly, for an IDE replacement rather than just an editor, I'd suggest Emacs rather than Vim. Reasons: * Emacs plays well with other programs, you can start other shells, language interpreters etc, from within Emacs and interact with them easily. There are some Vim plugins that try to enable this but I've always found them less satisfying. * Emacs is usable in all the same scenarios as Vim (i.e. cross-platform, over ssh, dual GUI/Terminal ability, screen/tmux/dvtm compatible etc) Random Thoughts: Vim is an amazing editor but I've always found that these attempts to add features to make it into an IDE cause it to start to feel clunky. Emacs on the other hand, plugins generally work well (except when they don't). Vim (or at least vi) is installed on basically every Unix install (and available for install everywhere). Emacs is installable everywhere also but setup generally takes a bit longer. If you are going to use Emacs and you are intrigued by Vim style keybindings, I've found Emacs Evil-mode to be one of the best Vim emulation packages that I've tried (most Vim emulation packages will eventually cause frustration - Evil mostly doesn't). I find that I use Vim more when I'm switching between a lot of different computers, and Emacs when I'm mostly developing on one stable computer setup. So my workflow in a particular environment is usually,
first install Vim so I can get work done, and as I use the environment more I'll end up installing Emacs and gradually switching over to it. |