Because the low-level modularity of Vim and Emacs gives you more control, by letting you choose the combination of tools you use ; instead of tying together the language(s), the compiler, the tag/completion engine, the build/project system, the debugger, the profiler, like many IDEs do.

The sole concept of IDEs specialized for one language makes me cringe.

I am a long time Vim user but I have never ever managed to get c++ tag completion work consistently there. At some point I just stopped trying - went to Qt creator and turned on Vim plugin there. The experience (for C++) is just vastly superior. The IDE integrates with CMake natively, the debugger is graphical and works, the symbol navigation over all project is blazing fast, I have real refactoring etc...

I still use Vim a lot, for JavaScript, for text, for remote sessions... But when a tool with real semantic highlighting and understanding of code is available (with a Vim plugin) then I'll take that.

Check out https://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/ C/C++ completion for VIM.

Of course an IDE like QT Creator does many things better. But it's a tradeoff always.

> The sole concept of IDEs specialized for one language makes me cringe.

Can you explain this a bit? I don't see that Sublime, VS Code, Atom, etc. were made for one language, at all. As a little background, I've used vim for a while, then switched to Sublime Text, and am just trying VS Code. I find Sublime/VS Code/Atom to be far easier to customize than vim.

This is not what I said: I consider Atom and Sublime Text to be advanced general-purpose text editors, not IDEs.

I was indeed referring to Eclipse and Visual Studio. From what I observed around me, for some reason, people don't use these to edit:

- shellscripts/perlscripts/batchfiles.

- Files written in a in-house domain-specific language.

- Configuration files.

- Makefiles and project files: vcxproj, sln ...

Actually, I observed that these kind of IDEs discouraged people doing the above things, giving them the impression that it's not "real development" (I suspect that this is, in part, where the bizarre term "scripting language" comes from, but this is another debate).

I'm pretty sure he is referring to Eclipse, Visual Studio and the like.