Their existence doesn't surprise me, but they deserve less respect for making foolish choices.

An idiot savant is still an idiot.

I'll welcome any points made for VIM that acknowledge the immense value provided by IDEs, but if I had already seen such points I wouldn't even be posting here today.

Every argument I've seen for VIM systematically denies:

* That programming is hard work.

* That making life easier is a good thing.

Its just an extension of the masochism that permeates programming culture.

Your tone and absolutism is getting you down voted like crazy. You're placing the IDE experience on a pedastal and it's really not warranted. IDE's can have lots of problems, speaking as 15 year enterprise java developer. The primary problem is hiding complexity from the developer, which is obviously good and bad. For example, IDE's typically maintain an internal representation of a project, which can get out of sync in wierd ways. It's easy to spend multiple minutes rebuilding and refreshing "objects" (ie file and subprojects, and maven modules, etc) trying to get things back in sync. Here I'm speaking from years of fighting Eclipse, other Java IDE's like in IntelliJ are purportedly better in this regard. The fact remains, it provides an abstraction over the source files on disk, which are the source of truth.

Where vim and command line tools shine is giving the developer powerful tools to examine and manipulate projects, as they exist, on disk.

I personally believe there's a place for both. Vim and the cli are my secret weapon when it comes to comprehending, researching, and working with large, legacy, java enterprise applications. I only use an IDE when I'm actually editing java source files, which isn't very often. YMMV.

Yea you're right I've overstated my position. Don't really see how vim is useful for excploring a codebase.

Ever heard of ctags bud?

That isn't what the word idiot savant means it would be helpful in future discussions if you would learn the terms and idioms you intend to use. Idiot savants is a term for those who possess some interesting intellectual talent despite profound mental disability.

The individuals you are disparaging are merely talented developers working on useful projects they possess neither a surprising intellectual talent nor profound disability.

Despite your very superior opinion of yourself disagreeing with you doesn't imply mental disability.

You know why I don't like IDEs (especially bloated crap like RubyMine?) Because they're reasource hogs. They run slower. Vim + Tmux is as fast as you can think.