I’d use an ide from day 1 instead of wasting time with vim.

I seriously dramatically slowed down my advancement as a programmer because I didn’t use a full featured ide straight up.

Now I only use vi to edit files in /etc

I'd use Vim from day 1, instead of wasting time with several IDEs.

Why would anyone not want the power of an ide?

Is it a Unix tough guy thing where there’s nothing that a GUI app does that you can’t do better in a terminal? Or is it that you’ve never really spent a lot of time in a professional ide so when you argue against it, it’s cause you don’t know?

People are not sure what benefit is going to be provided to make up for the inferior text manipulation capabilities.

I remember tab completion being a big thing. When I was a new programmer, I really wanted that stuff, for sure. But as I see it now, I find the cases where I don't remember the name of the function I want to call rarer, instead wondering about the undocumented things like "is this method thread-safe?", "who owns the memory for this result object?", "what happens when the connection times out?", "does the error message this function returns contain the name of the file it couldn't open, or do I have to add it myself?" and so on, and the only way to find out is to open the source code of the library I'm using and to read it.

Like maybe IDE tooling has evolved to the point where it's just one keystroke to get the right answers to those questions, but I kind of doubt it. So if you want to demean people for not using an IDE, you need to sell it a little better and tell us what we're missing. If it's just tab completion and a shitty build system like IDEs were 10 years ago... not interested but thanks. If there is something that's actually helpful though, would consider.

What inferior text manipulation capabilities?

Every IDE or text editor I have ever used had very limited text manipulation and navigation capabilities.

The only exceptions are VIM and Emacs (and editors that follow that spirit, like Neovim).

Vim especially has an entire language of text manipulation and navigation features. This language is made up of actions (like c for change or d for delete), Motions (like hjkl for left, up, down, right respectively) and Repetitions. These elements can be combined into very powerful commands, especially since there are a lot of Actions and Motions that can be performed. This is made possible by the Modal Editing[1] that Vim provides. You would simply type these commands in "Normal Mode" and then you would be dropped into "Insert Mode" if necessary.

At first this might seem very silly or inefficient, but after a while it becomes almost second nature and is more efficient then using the mouse or pressing Arrow Keys 100 times. Especially if combined with the Macro capabilities and the Search Commands.

Some examples of this language:

Navigate 10 lines up: 10k

Navigate 10 lines down: 10j

Go to the beginning of the next Method: ]m

Change the word under the cursor: cw

Change the paragraph under the Cursor: cip

Change the inside of "" pair under the Cursor: ci"

Change a pair of "" after the Cursor: ca"

Change the inside of {} pair under the Cursor: ci{

Visually select the text from the cursor until the 3rd occurrence of the character x going to the left without selecting the x: v3Tx

Same thing, but going right: v3tx

Same thing, but going to the right and selecting the x: v3fx

Same thing, but change instead of visual select: c3Tx

Same thing, but do a rot13 "encryption" after selecting: v3Txg?

[1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/57708

This stuff is all supported by IDEs, though. e.g., https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim