I recently discovered VisiData and I'm on a huge TUI kick right now because of it. I know GUIs have their advantages and I use them, but opening a file in vim or VisiData at light speed feels so good compared to firing up IntelliJ or some spreadsheet program. Good keybindings make working in the program a joy. These tools are often made by hackers/for hackers, not some corporate structure trying to pad their resume with whatever new feature looks good but works like shit that nobody asked for. When people developing the tool are also using the tool you get a good tool; this isn't exclusive to TUIs but it's common and it's one of the reasons that when they work they work so well.
If IntelliJ was as fast as vim or VisiData, and as a bonus totally scriptable (I think it is to some extent, but just for fun let's assume you could change everything), which would you prefer then?
Vim and Visidata. Emacs, actually. Open source rules all in my book.
IntelliJ is open source.
Sorry, wrong term. I meant FOSS. There is some software I can justify paying big bucks for (although the list is getting increasingly shorter thanks to better and better FOSS projects). But Emacs with zero licenses at all, and being the most customizable text editor on the planet? Vim, with the most innovative and speedy keybindings? What a steal.
Don't get me wrong, JetBrains has some cool stuff. It's nice to see they're working on a lighter-weight text editor to add some competition to the newbie-friendly text editor market. And JetBrains Mono is a phenomenal monospace font.
IntelliJ is open source/FOSS/FLOSS/Free Software, etc, here is the code[0], license is Apache 2.0.