IdeaVim plugin is awesome in Jetbrains IDEs. You just get the best of both worlds.

Same vim simulation plugins (albeit far less powerful) exist in most common IDEs.

I like jetbrains IDEs and pay for a personal subscription, but after switching to a highly configured neovim it’s hard to use the IDE for primary development.

I still go back to it for major refactors and gnarly merges, because the LSPs from jetbrains are unparalleled. But as a result of their features it is incredibly laggy and slow compared to neovim, not to mention so RAM-heavy.

After adjusting to such high quality and fast nvim plugins like telescope, it makes the jetbrains editor feel like I’m moving through molasses to do a project-wide search, for example. And the vim simulation doesn’t (can’t?) support some of the more advanced features, or some really great plugins.

The biggest difference is in individual key latency though, I notice regular stutters while typing in the jetbrains IDEs that just don’t exist in nvim. It just throws me off if I’m in the flow typing and the input just freezes for a couple hundred ms..

I’ve also used Vim as my main editor for 10+ years. After that, I spent a year or so with Emacs, and then a couple of years with Sublime Text 4 once I got tired of configuration. I never fully gave up on Vim though, I use it if I work remotely or have to do data transformation via macros.

I’m currently testing Helix [1], which is a terminal editor with Vim-like keybindings — but which requires no configuration or plugins (LSP works out of the box, sensible leader keybindings by default, multiple cursors is built in). It lacks some features like snippets and folding though. Vim -> Helix reminds me of when I switched Zsh -> Fish: I lost some power, but it did 80% of what I wanted from a custom config without any work. Remains to see whether I’ll stick with it long-term though.

[1]: https://helix-editor.com/

Used vim as main IDE back in ~2014-2015, it was too cumbersome and I switched to Spacemacs which also became cumbersome eventually and I switched to IDEs like CLion (for Rust). However now I've tried out neovim (lazyvim and everything around that) and am pleasantly surprised at latency and stability (plus, lua and not vimscript); modern LSs are miles ahead of what it used to be like back in the day, too. Will probably be switching back to neovim now unless there's unforeseen stoppers.

Over the last 20+ years I've used it heavily on and off cycling with other feature rich editors (jedit + plugins).

In the past few years, the plugins fzf.vim and telescope.nvim made vim/nvim my go-to by making vim/nvim ridiculously more useful. Taking the time to set these up to your liking really pays off. Eventually, I moved completely to nvim.

I love the nvim project especially for how it rejuvenated the vim landscape and the cutting edge plugin ecosystem.

For rust development, rust-tools.nvim and rust-analyzer has fared really well compared to VSCodium.

The only case where I don't use vim is jvm based languages, so many of which coevolved with ides I think they're pretty painful to use without.