Vim keyboard bindings offer nowhere near the capabilities of a real Vim. They only offer the basics and never advanced vim features. Vim is so much more then just keybindings, it is more of a text manipulation language. There is only one exception to that and that is Emacs Evil mode.

The other way around is much more likely: Vim plugins offer all those IDE features and integrate them seamless into vim and its way of manipulating text.

Honestly, after learning and modifying vim for myself I found IDEs to be limited, bloated and slow.

I thought the same until recently and found the underlying java nonsense of an IDE to be slow, forever indexing. But due to work I had to use an IDE. Much to my surprise it was not slow. Plus I learn from it. I like the code errors showing and I like learning new things from the auto complete. I also like the plugins for database and Redis stores. Plus debugging is great. Give it a go and avoid modding down those that wish to share their experiences!

I used plenty of IDEs (from free ones up to expensive enterprise IDEs) and I still prefer Vim. In fact I started with an enterprise Visual Studio when I first started programming and only years later switched to Vim.

Which IDE do you use now? I am willing to give it a try, but most likely I already have.

Vim can be configured to show code errors (by integrating linters, static code analysis or "just" by integrating the compiler, or doing all 3).

Vim can also be configured to do auto complete. Actually I have not found a IDE that can provide Python (which I use a lot) autocomplete better or up to the standard that vim has and I have not found a IDE that can provide autocomplete for so many different languages.

Database work and debugging is something I mostly just use specialized tools for and don't have a need to integrate that into my text editor. Sure it was nice to just click and have a break point on that line like I did in Visual Studio, but that isn't something I miss.

Also: What do you mean by "modding down"?