Just so we don't compare apples and oranges: The refactoring tooling in jetbrains products is unique. I haven't seen vscode or any other ide capable of reproducing this, at least not for dynamic languages.

I wouldn't use this as the basis of an argument for superiority of IDEs in general over vim.

And of course there are tradeoffs, rubymine users I worked with always complained about startup times and heavy indexing. (This was a few years back, maybe it's improved since)

I use VIm in vscode quite a lot, and I do reach for macros to refactor code a lot more than when I switch to a JetBrains IDE. But I couldn't see a benefit to using vim outside of vscode for these refactoring operations, so I'd be curious to know whether you do and what you use?

I'm not saying vim emulation has anything to do with refactoring, I'm saying that outside the jetbrains stable there are no refactoring tools worth speaking of, i.e. refactoring is not a variable in which IDEs in general beat vim.

If you can write vim macros to extract method, push up dependencies etc, then you've made vim better than most IDEs.

Yeah, I’m also leaning to just learn the heck out of vscode internals and tune it to my own needs maybe via custom plugins, instead of running behind the train. Sometimes investments just stop returning, and you have to make bold moves want it or not.