[nfm]

I respectfully disagree. Choosing to use a graphical IDE or a terminal based editor is a matter of personal preference; it's foolish to proclaim one or the other as universally superior. There are pros and cons to each, and they are fundamentally different in many ways.

Yes, vim is old, but it's not a web browser - it's for manipulating text (or in our case, code), the process of which has changed little in the last 30 years.

Before writing vim off, pair program with someone who is masterful at it and you'll see some if its many pros first hand. Yes, this may take (quite literally) years of use and customization to achieve, but no, it's certainly not something you can write off as obsolete or inferior.

[kamaal]

This is the issue, if you a need a vim master and a couple of pair programming session to learn what vim is, you are doing it the wrong way.

Why is it wrong to enable auto suggest by default? Or the file browser or minimap by default? Why not enable directory level grep/search by default? Why do you need to learn two decade old arcane 3 fold command sets for simple search-replace. Why aren't line numbers turned on by default? Why not provide tabbing by default?

None of what I have mentioned is something uncommon to developers. Every developer needs to this almost everyday with his code.

If you see modern day GUI based editors, they are basically designed to solve these daily little recurring annoyances and made available to you out of the box without you have to do to too much of tinkering. Like everything needs of developers change with time.

Software usability is a very important aspect of software engineering.

My primary concern is in assuming the usage of difficult tools as geeky and cool. By merely learning how to use a two decade difficult to use tool doesn't make a person a great programmer.