How much do you use your IDE?
These people who claim not to use - or even need - an integrated debugger frighten me. Do you really think your code has no bugs? Really? I must add this to the list of questions I ask anyone my company is buying software from, because if I'm buying software and if the vendor has honestly never felt the need for good debugging capabilities - well, they're straight out the door.
The example given of moving around and quickly editing files however doesn't personally fit my work flow; I tend to write code in blocks, at best swapping between .cpp and .h file from time to time (alt+o in VAX) or opening a new file to work on (shift-alt-o in VAX) and while those keys might not be on the home row I'm not convinced that, in my case, the overall gain is going to be worth it. I spend most of my time thinking or writing blocks of code in the same place.
I won't presume to know your habits better than you do, but I wouldn't be surprised that if you held down Ctrl+Z (or whatever shortcut for undo) after coding for an hour or so, you'd see the code's watermark and your cursor position 'recede' up and down again a fair bit. I have at least found that writing even brand new code involves a lot of changing stuff and shifting pieces around. In vim I can do this at about as close to the 'speed of thought' as is possible.
But you could well be right about overall gains; the reason I switched from an IDE to vim in the first place was because I was in a situation where I had to go back and forth between X-Code and VS. The differences in shortcuts alone was enough impetus to make me give emacs or vim a try, where the keys were the same on all platforms. The learning curve was incredibly steep.
Yeah, Object Oriented programming really waters down the gains of something like vim. Switching between different files quickly, jumping to parts of a file by viewing a semantic breakdown of the file, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I like vim and use it all the time.
Don't get me wrong, I like vim and use it all the time.
Not really, I have the TagBar plugin... and that's another nice thing -- any feature can be added to an extensible vim in your favorite scripting language 
There are all sorts of plugins to jump between files too, but once a project's open, doing ":b" with filename globbing tends to be speedy enough for me.
There are all sorts of plugins to jump between files too, but once a project's open, doing ":b" with filename globbing tends to be speedy enough for me.
Scripting useful tools into vim? You mean, integrating them into vim? Why would anyone want to integrate their development environment?
Exactly. I said earlier that you might call vim an IDE. I'm not arguing against IDEs in principle at all.
I wouldn't be without an IDE these days - Visual Studio for my C++ projects and QtCreator for work stuff are my personal choices.
But...
I'm very glad I learned to program (C and C++ in my case) at a command line using a text editor and makefiles and so on, as I don't feel that I personally would have developed the understanding I have of the C++ compilation model had I started with an IDE. This understanding is invaluable when things go wrong and has also very much eased my recent requirement to learn and work with Qt quickly.
That said, if I wasn't stuck using language that has such a complex and draconian compilation model, this understanding would be moot. But I am so I'm glad. So ner.
But...
I'm very glad I learned to program (C and C++ in my case) at a command line using a text editor and makefiles and so on, as I don't feel that I personally would have developed the understanding I have of the C++ compilation model had I started with an IDE. This understanding is invaluable when things go wrong and has also very much eased my recent requirement to learn and work with Qt quickly.
That said, if I wasn't stuck using language that has such a complex and draconian compilation model, this understanding would be moot. But I am so I'm glad. So ner.
In vim I can do this at about as close to the 'speed of thought' as is possible.
Ah, well, I tend to think long and hard before doing things ;)
But, seriously, my way of working tends to be very sedate on the whole; I can type quickly and navigate fast but tend not to... in fact when I see people bashing keys quickly and wizzing around source files I tend to think 'dude, slow down... it's not a race'
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