I found a SO poll from 2021 result listing percentages of respondents IDEs [0]. There's overlap, so developers can use more than one, but Visual Studio Code is at 71%, Visual Studio at 33%, Notepad++ at 30% and vim in in 5th place at 24% (IntelliJ is at 29%).

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-...

Editing the commit message in vim - check the 'vim' box. ;)

I feel like these classic editors are good to know just for general education like writing cursive. If you end up on some barebones system you will know how to edit a config file and exit. But for day-to-day it's all IDEs nowadays.

The line between "IDE" and "text editor" has blurred to the point where I'm not sure they're super useful terms anymore. When I used vim up till about 2019, I had it configured with all the toys to the point where it wasn't all that far off of where my VSCode setup is today.

Also, you know, insert Emacs joke here assuming if you still have enough RAM to post, etc.

I don’t believe there’s a useful distinction, at least for more advanced editors. For instance, I’m not aware of anything you can do in, say, PyCharm that you can’t do in Emacs or Vim. I don’t mean that in a curmudgeonly way like “nothing I care about, because we don’t need those fancy features to write a pageful of Fortran on my 1997 laptop”. I mean, I don’t know of a single feature of any kind that doesn’t exist on essentially all modern editors.

> I mean, I don’t know of a single feature of any kind that doesn’t exist on essentially all modern editors.

All composed commands. Like Repeat. As in `repeat the following command 5 times`.

Like `d5` in Vim (delete 5lines).

Or y30 (Copy 30 lines).

Or `V?^func` (select text from current cursor position to the beginning of the function).

None of those are memorised commands. They're simply one command composed with another.

Composability is the real killer feature in Vim. Even in Emacs, I don't get the same ease of composability as I do in Vim.

In emacs your repeat commands are C-u <number> <other command>. Your selection would be C-space C-s func M-b.

M-b causes it to go back to the beginning of the word and search ends, you can still adjust the selection with other movements. It's not as tight as V?<regex> but it's still composable.

Or you use evil mode and get those vi-style bindings in the editor.

EDIT: Actually, playing around with your `V?` command doesn't it select that entire line rather than to that pattern? So the emacs equivalent would actually be: C-space C-M-s ^func C-e

Well, ok. I’m specifically talking about what might count as an IDE feature. Vim and Emacs can run in a terminal, but that’s not a defining characteristic of an IDR. More like, everything can do interactive debugging, and syntax highlighting, and code completion, edit-time error flagging, etc. etc.

> Well, ok. I’m specifically talking about what might count as an IDE feature.

Well, that changes things. I replied to the 'programming text editor' part.

It's even blurrier when you realize how many people are using LSP. Emacs with elgot is literally just a different UI in front of the same IDE tooling as VSCode.

The editor wars are over and everyone won because of separation of concerns. Yay!

VSCode came out of nowhere and took the market share previously held by Atom and Sublime Text 2

The folks I know who use Emacs or vim (including me) are by and large still using those tools since before Atom and Sublime got popular. We just have LSP, now, like VSCode does.

I'm primarily developing Elixir and Javascript and a few years ago I switched from Emacs/Spacemacs to VS Code. What pushed me over the edge were projects like VSpaceCode (basically replicating Spacemacs keybinding and menu system) and edamagit (replicating Magit). I've tried Zed and I'm quite optimistic about it, but so far not willing to put the work in to replicate enough of my setup.

I moved from vim to vscode. The main driver was an easier time writing extensions.

I've tried to switch to neovim twice since and gave up. Lua is nice and I did get into that the first time. Crashing and errors were rife though. The second time, which was very recently, it seemed like everything had changed again, all completely new plugins etc. And I struggled to do some basic stuff, I guess I've just forgotten the more in-depth file/window management. So it goes.

And VSCode came about mostly from Microsoft's push. They wanted an "in" for non Microsoft languages, and VSCode gave them that, as well as a Microsoft-provided environment for dotNet on Linux / Mac. This meant that JavaScript / Node developers could still be folded into Microsoft tooling (telemetry) without forcing them into the crushing heaviness of Visual Studio on Windows.

It was a really slick play. Still, it was an overall positive for the profession, and you can still use VSCodium without the telemetry.

Whether or not a large number of people use vim has no bearing on whether or not Zed will reach feature parity with it.

Parent seemed to believe that it's a waste to write another editor/IDE because vim already exists. Prevalence of other more popular editors disagrees with that.

I use vim to edit git commit messages and other git related tasks as I'm most comfortable/used to working with the git cli (muscle memory, etc.).

I also use either vim or nano when viewing/editing files on the command line (either msys2 wsl, or headless linux).

Re: IDEs, I mainly use IntelliJ, with VSCode being used for a few things.