In the last Stack Overflow survey[1] I was surprised to see quite a large percentage of respondents considered vim to be an "IDE". Don't get me wrong, I love vim and nvim, but I use them as editors and not as a fully fledged IDEs.

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-integrated...

Vim is a code editor for me and my entire OS is my IDE.

The thing though is that I can pipe stuff other applications are doing into my vim terminal and have it effectively behave like an IDE.

There’s very little (nothing?) an IDE does that cannot also be exposed and manipulated within VIM (and the same goes for Emacs obviously).

If you install enough vim plugins you can get pretty close to VS Code in terms of both features and performance.

I wouldn't call VS code an IDE either, personally

Well, UNIX is the IDE ("The UNIX Programming Environment") and vi/vim is just the editor component of that. This is only half serious but I'm not fully joking either. The combination of tools and the ability to make pipes and custom scripts does, over a while result in a decent "development environment".

There is (was?) a vim plugin that ran the intellij completion engine on the background. Pretty cool

That's how I did Java for the first 10 years or so. I'd switch back and forth with emacs, depending on the editing task.

Eclipse finally came out with a decent debugger, and so I switched to an IDE. Java-the-language has since leaned heavily into IDEs; a lot of tedious-but-useful tasks (like strong typing) are significantly easier that way.

I'll still use vi for small edits, and either vi or emacs when I want to do a particular kind of search-and-replace that's better handled by them.