It's been years since I last used an IDE, but in my experience, they come with huge toolbars stuffed full of menus to open wizards with tons of options. The learning curve is just as steep.

Their advantage is that they provide lots of automatic features like spellcheck and autocomplete out-of-the-box, whereas you have to set these up yourself for Emacs/Vim.

I think that's why people are talking up what they see as an alternative to the monolithic IDE: the lightweight text editor with support for extensions. I know Atom isn't particularly lightweight in terms of memory usage, but it is in terms of functionality.

Lightweight in terms of functionality, not lightweight in terms of memory. Excellent combination.

One out of two ain't bad. At least they've left the one which will get 'fixed' if they just do nothing for long enough.

> I think that's why people are talking up what they see as an alternative to the monolithic IDE: the lightweight text editor with support for extensions.

Which is what vim and emacs, relative to IntelliJ, VS, VSCode, and Atom, are.

Lightweight text editor that doesn't drive you crazy the first time you try to quit it? ;-) As I said in another comment, I'm a daily vi user, but that's almost always when it's my only option. And that's been the case for well over a decade now. I just happen to feel more comfortable using sublime text; I always know how to do what I need to do, it's obvious, it's a pleasant experience. But I totally get some people have the same experience with vi/Emacs, and that's cool.

Oh, geez, cowboy up. Nontechnical secretaries learned how to use Multics Emacs back in the 70s and extend it using Lisp. Now you're telling me we can't expect professional programmers to learn it or vim?

If the return on investment justifies it, of course learn vi/Emacs. I use vi myself on a daily basis, but you must admit that not every professional programmer does. For those that don't, atom might be another option.