> The amount of work needed not only to get a basic IDE up and running for your languages of choice, even for commonly used languages such as Python or Javascript, is far too much for someone who wants to get on with their day job or hobby coding and doesn't want to spend precious hours fixing obscure issues in Lua.

"This airplane is the choice of professional pilots! The first thing we advise you to do is turn the yoke upside down, it's much more ergonomic like that. Also, you probably want to rip out the altimeter and replace it with a custom one that has more features. And bring your own GPS unit and tape it to the windshield, because this plane doesn't have one by default. And of course, remember that unlike in your car, 'left' actually means right in this plane. This is the professional way. Ah yes, when you fly over Canada, you will see a blinking warning sign telling you that you're out of fuel. That's just a small glitch caused by metric/imperial confusion. It has been known for 23 years but we haven't quite gotten around to fixing it yet. Don't worry, this plane is still excellent for professional pilots. If you feel otherwise, you are probably not a real professional."

More that you want to carve a bowl out of wood. Vim is like a knife that with some modifications you can turn into a carving knife. VSCode is like a chainsaw that has attachments that have been made for it and it also has bowl carving attachment.

If you don't know your tools, then you can easily mess the knife modification and not end up with a carving knife. The chainsaw with ready made attachments is way easier to get going, but in return you have to carry the chainsaw with you and if there are any problems with the tool itself you probably aren't going to be able to fix or modify it yourself.

So it is more like trading initial speed with more precision, but also being able to do more after the initial learning curve.

> The chainsaw with ready made attachments is way easier to get going, but in return you have to carry the chainsaw with you and if there are any problems with the tool itself you probably aren't going to be able to fix or modify it yourself.

This is where your analogy breaks down for me. The "chainsaw" (VSCode) is absolutely perfect for the tasks I'm using it for. When I write Python code, the Python extension gives me exactly what I want. That's because the environment it creates has been fine-tuned based on feedback from thousands of users with similar requirements to my own. There's no need for me to modify anything, any more than I modify my car or my trousers. It's simply ready for me to do professional work, and whenever I have special requirements, I know that I will find an extension that caters to them also. I don't need or want to reinvent a wheel that has been invented hundreds of times already, and polished to perfection through more man-hours than I could ever hope to invest myself.

You get exactly the same functionality with (neo)vim plugins.

Only difference is that because vim has been open-source for decade, there are many many more plugins, and hence the choice is harder to make. VSCode also helped improve the (neo)vim experience (e.g. language servers)

Comparing VSCode and Vim is like comparing a standard calculator with an RPN one.

> Only difference is that because vim has been open-source for decade, there are many many more plugins

No, the main difference is in the quality of plugins, not in how many there are.

For example, Rust-Analyzer provides an official VSCode extension, which is professionally maintained by members of the Rust core team. The extension is part of the Rust-Analyzer project itself, and can be installed with a single click, at which point it just works.

For Vim, you have to manually download (and update) the Rust-Analyzer binary, install a third-party plugin, configure them to work together, and hope (1) that the whole thing doesn't break when the plugin or the language server is updated, and (2) that this concoction provides a tiny fraction of the functionality that the official VSCode extension does.

I don't think that is true. If you browse the vscode marketplace and search e.g. for python [1] you literally get hundreds of plugins. If you scroll down only a bit, you quickly end up at plugins that only have a few hundred to a few ten downloads. I highly doubt that the quality of those plugins is better than the plugins for (neo)vim.

For your Rust-Analyzer Plugin example: I can install Rust-Analyzer with Mason in a few seconds as well and then (if you have lsp-zero [3] installed) it also just works™.

But I agree, keeping a vim configuration up to date is akin to a hobby (which I by the way enjoy quite bit).

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=python&targ... [2] https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim [3] https://github.com/VonHeikemen/lsp-zero.nvim