Screwdriver: specific to only one type of screw, limited to only a couple of similar sizes and all you can do is drive screws in and out or maybe stab someone.

Assembly line: way more complex and needs some setup time but you can do WAY more things with it, way faster, way more efficient once setup, especially on a larger scale. It can drive screws in and out, solder, cut, fold, package etcetcetcetc. Pretty much anything you set it up to.

So, vi is a horrible replacement or alternative to use in the typical huge Java (or what have you) e.g. web app projects where things like auto completion and easily getting from one class to another, built-in compiling, debugging, refactoring, source control etcetcetcetc really start to make your life easier. vi on its own cannot offer you that, not even remotely... then you need a shell and other programs to do all that. And there are no alternatives to most of the tasks an IDE can offer you help with.

vi is definitely nice for editing files especially on a slow line and as a general purpose editor - but it is no replacement for an IDE and the comparison that it is "better than an IDE" might only apply for exactly one task: editing files. IDEs offer you tons of other things. So it is just wrong to compare to two or present one as a replacement for the other.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938995

If your point is that this handful of advantages is a slam dunk, and that it makes IDEs and vim+console incomparable such that whoever does so is making a categorical error, then your point has no legs to stand on.

I am more than sufficiently "fluent" in pretty much all common IDEs and in vi(m)+console so that I don't really care which one I am using or have to use neither do I care on which OS... most of the time I end up in a good IDE because for a lot of the tasks I want to do and get paid to do, there are no real alternatives in vim+console, they might be specific though.

The article argued vim's superiority in editing so comparing that to an IDE really are two completely different things. Comparing vim+console to an IDE is always going to be all about personal preferences and which extensions do you use in the one or the other, which tools/options/tasks are available and which aren't - but ultimately they cater to two usually very different crowds: the console-lovers and the oh-shiny-clicky crowd and you will find it very difficult to even remotely describe an advantage of the one to a member of the other crowd... and that's where the comparison doesn't add up and feels to me like apples-oranges.

That's been my point from the beginning. Tradeoffs between personal preferences is a hallmark of apples-apples comparisons. I mean apples-apples in the sense that both toolsets are used to accomplish the same exact things. I agree that there are the two general types of people that you describe, but I disagree that they are so irreconciliable that they shouldn't even attempt to discuss the tradeoffs. It is a perfectly reasonable discussion to have.

Dudes on assembly lines use screwdrivers.

(It's really good, too, I use it at work.)