I have vim, neovim and emacs (and spacemacs) installed. Right now I'm trying to get into emacs a bit more.

What's interesting to me, and the reason I try to keep up to date with the latest changes for all four editors, is that it's been now, what, 25 years (?) since emacs and vim started "competing" and they still are. I guess we could be saying the same in 10 years about firefox and chrome, but it still is amazing in my opinion. It's amazing that so much work has been done to vim and emacs, and so many changes, so many users using them for different things. And there is still no clear winner. I'm not trying to start a discussion about the strenghts and weaknesses of each. Just expressing my appreciation.

Thank you for your great work, to everyone involved with vim and emacs, and more recently neovim and spacemacs. You are awesome.

I became an heavy Emacs user as I could not find the comfort of Borland IDEs in UNIX, as I started to use it.

Since I moved away from C++ into Java and .NET land, never felt the need to use them any longer.

And nowadays, with Qt Creator, Clion, xCode, AppCode and VS, I also don't feel the need of them when I need to go back to C++.

It is very good to know the basics from plain Vi, because there are still commercial UNIX systems without GNU tools installed, just bare bones installations.

So for me the question is why there are still people that enjoy working as if their computers are using a 25 year old developer experience.

For example, these are some of my favorites:

https://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/ - Code completion for C/C++ and other languages

https://github.com/ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim - TextMate style ctrl+p fuzzy file finder

https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree - Tree explorer plugin for browsing files

https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline - Customizable status line for showing all kinds of useful info about currently edited file

https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive - Git wrapper that works together with airline

https://github.com/mhinz/vim-startify - Shows your most recently edited files and favorite files on the start screen

https://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish - Smart text replacement, easily replace eg. getColor, GetColor -> getTransparency, GetColor and so on

And this combined with the fact that I can do all of this from the tip of my fingers, without having to touch the mouse, with high customizable commands that go into my muscle memory, there is no substitute for VIM for me.

I've worked with Eclipse, Xcode, Visual Studio. They have some pretty nice features, like interactive debugging that are hard to replicate with Vim, but I'm more of a "print debug message" kind of guy anyway, so that doesn't bother me.

The biggest hinderance with Visual UIs is that I have to use the mouse, and that sucks. So much faster to do text selection, copying, replacement, renaming and so on straight from the keyboard, once you get used to it.

I'm still discovering active new ways to customize VIM after over 15 years of using it.