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Vim features that IDE wish they could have
This post is not here to convince you to use vim, but to show you what choices vim made 50 years ago that are still relevant today. Choices that bring benefits that moderns IDEs try to replicate the best they can with their own constraints. This post will also explain some points that make vim feels alien at first but might slowly become your favorite way of editing code.
The first impression: could it get worse?
To the surprise of nobody, vim is not beginner-friendly. Everything will be different from your usual text editor or IDE of choice. This is so hard for beginners that you can find those kinds of images everywhere on the internet:
But one need to remember, the goal of an editor is not being beginner-friendly. Writing software is hard, you are (probably) not choosing your language or tech stack based on how beginner-friendly it is. You also take into accounts the advantages of your tools and if the advantages outweighs the difficulties of it, you simply use it. Need an example about hard to learn tools that you or your company probably uses: Kubernetes, Git, JS Bundlers, Hexagonal Architecture, React/Angular/YourNewJsFramwork or even Rust (probably not used at your company tho).
The first thing you should seek in a tool is its capacities. You should prefer use powerful tools over easy tools for most use cases ; and my guess is you already are doing that for your text editor. Does any of you is using notepad as your daily editor? I certainly hope not.
So I just said that you should prefer powerful tools and I guess most of you think that vim is not one of those tools. After all, how can a tool originally created in 1976 be still considered powerful today considering it did not change that much on a surface level?