Vim As Ide

opening

While I am saying IDEs force people to use the conf and workflows of others, I won't deny that those *workflows* can be smart, that's why I always want to try IDEs to see whatever nice feathers they have, I won't use them directly inside that IDE, instead if I find something I really love, I will try to figure out how to do the same with Vim. Let me give a example, QtCreator? has the abilty to obtain the documantation for a certain Qt class through clicks, I checked it and liked it, and later I succeeded in doing the same(just faster) using Vim and lynx. Vim is a programmer's editor, besides fast text editing, it does has the smarts to "understand" programmings(plz try *:h gd*, *:h tags*, and *h: cscope*...). and I also use plugins like a.vim, taglist.vim. As to your text changing operation, I think Vim&Cscope can do the same. If you know something really neat and efficent in your IDE that you love and you believe Vim can not do, plz let me know. I won't claim I am a Vim expert, because I am not, but I believe there is nothing of real value that a IDE can do and Vim can not.--PeterWang

I love Vim, and love to use command line to do everything(Maybe not everything, I do use GIMP and firefox and lot more :)). Vim just works better with things like Bash and Git, and thus represents the Unix culture well. Developers love Unix, since they get to know the basic and important ideas quickly, for the same reason the love command line over GUI. But maybe that's also why so many people find it so hard to learn Vim, since they'll first have to know some CommadLineFu? --PeterWang

what do you think?

My preference for a GUI may be due to being dyslexic. IMO both command line and GUI are powerful, and both have a niche to fill.

see also DoWeReallyNeedIde