> vi users tout the rapid text editing features, but you can generate and navigate code just as fast with an IDE - out of the box - no configuration incantations or third party packages required.
You can navigate code and you benefit from powerful autocompletion (well, depending on your language, because it may quickly degrade to "laughable" with something a bit dynamic). However, the pure text editing experience with vanilla Eclipse/VS is rubbish compared to Vim. In addition, there are languages for which IDE-based code generation/autocompletion is not that interesting due to the language being a lot more compact. And with something like syntastic + the right language plugin, a strongly-typed language gets syntax checking, a description of the type of a variable, and possibly autocompletion. I use both Eclipse (with a Vim plugin) and the real Vim, and it feels much nicer not have to deal with the resource and mental overhead of a full-blown IDE. I think the only feature I really miss when working OCaml/Merlin in Vim is being able to get a list of call sites of a given function in the current project.
This. Java with a great IDE is like a half-assed Smalltalk environment (with the notable exception that editing Smalltalk as text is trivially simple compared to java). Java+IDE gives you a kinda-sorta-macros (were macros are defined as code that write code - only the IDEs use some form of simplistic text-replacement code-generating stuff, not true macros), and kinda-sorta "smart" code (but you're not actually modifying objects in memory via a text view, like Smalltalk).
So the IDEs make it feasible to manage all the poor horizontal "abstractions" (complections, really) with all the different files and paths and whatnot. But they're much inferior to vi(m) for editing text.
Granted, if you don't do much text editing (writing, modifying, moving lines around) - the work you actually do do ("programming") - won't benefit much from a great text editor.
I used vim for small java projects before inner classes (massive spill of code/classes across files and folders) -- and it was pretty painful. When I changed to use Literate Programming - and could easily work on one file, letting the system generate the arbitrary structure java needed -- things went much more smoothly.
So, yes, YMMV - but if what you do is write/edit stuff that fits in a sane text format, a great editor is a great help. If what you're doing is composing objects from a large standard library of objects, you probably want an object editor like a visual, image-storage (as in vm image) based system like Smalltalk.
You can navigate code and you benefit from powerful autocompletion (well, depending on your language, because it may quickly degrade to "laughable" with something a bit dynamic). However, the pure text editing experience with vanilla Eclipse/VS is rubbish compared to Vim. In addition, there are languages for which IDE-based code generation/autocompletion is not that interesting due to the language being a lot more compact. And with something like syntastic + the right language plugin, a strongly-typed language gets syntax checking, a description of the type of a variable, and possibly autocompletion. I use both Eclipse (with a Vim plugin) and the real Vim, and it feels much nicer not have to deal with the resource and mental overhead of a full-blown IDE. I think the only feature I really miss when working OCaml/Merlin in Vim is being able to get a list of call sites of a given function in the current project.