vim modes in IDEs are often inadequate (if this is not immediately obvious, you probably just don't use vim as fully as possible). The IDEs are often (too) complex in the sense of a hodgepodge of GUI options and menus which are hard to navigate. You often can't put the IDE configuration in a version control system easily. IDEs are often sluggish. The plugin system for vim is superior to most IDEs.

It's not that using an IDE with a vim mode is not a possible viable alternative, but it's a game of trade-offs, as usual.

I agree completely. For me, for now, I have vscode with vim emulation. I find that it's more convenient to have everything vscode has + vim keys for a lot of things, than have all of vim + try to make vim do what I like from vscode.

I really hope in the future I'll find the time to do that, but for now I am content. It's always a trade-off.

Have you noticed any sluggishness when using Vim commands in VS Code? I use nvim + tmux as my go to and it's pretty responsive (still has trouble catching up to me sometimes) but I often have to wait for VS Code.

I have to wait sometimes, but normally it's fast. It's only when (I think) somehow the vim emulation bugs out that I need to wait a couple of seconds or just hit esc 5 times. Thankfully it's not often.

Because Vim modes usually don't support more than a handful of basic features, let alone plugins and custom keybindings.

Vim also starts up without any noticable delay and can be used for every text file, no matter in what context.

>Vim also starts up without any noticable delay

Only if you run it without any plugins. Unfortunately if you have a lot of third party packages, vim startup times start to get closer to emacs startup times (both of which are still better than any IDE I have used, of course). I keep a vim.norc alias in my alias file which launches vim with an empty .vimrc for this very reason.

Strange. I use 15 plugins and according to the --startuptime flag NeoVim takes 32ms to start. Vim takes about twice as long, but that's still so incredibly fast I'd call it instant. I guess when it comes to plugins there are some real heavy-hitters out there that I somehow managed to never try.

You could use autocmd for filetypes that require plugins, so they don’t load for configs/texts. If your pm of choice allows this separation, ofc.

I’m not very experienced with complex plugins, but most of what I’ve seen did nothing unless explicitly initiated. Maybe there are global variables to control that.

I've found that profiling startup time and lazy loading plugins could reduce your startup time to 100~200ms even if you have more than 50 plugins.

Vim has a plugin architecture. The built in language sucks balls but it does work.