As the boss of a company: micro managing your employees to the point where you dictate exactly how they work including their preferences for editing text is an excellent way to lose your best talents, who will likely be quirky and in some cases - possibly this case - know more about this than you do. And no, it is not 'like an electrician refusing to wear protective clothing', it is much more like an electrical engineer that knows when to use auto-routing and when to route things themselves.
Besides, I'd love to see you make your case to HR: "I want to fire this person because they don't edit their text like I do".
While I wouldn't want to fire someone for using bad/incomplete/incapable tooling, the Nth time someone doesn't follow the style guide (which is automated for everyone else, but not for this guy because his 1337 editor doesn't support it) or leaves bugs in that are caught automatically for everyone else because of editor support it's time to consider if his constant breaking of convention is an issue and he either needs to use more capable tooling or leave.
Less extreme than the previous poster, I'd actually like to provide JetBrains licenses for my teams and strongly suggest using them. The amount of help WebStorm, PyCharm, etc. give is honestly way too much to pass up and the kind of uniformity you can get from everyone using them is great, all out of the box.
I used to only use Vim and Emacs but there's no question they're much more incomplete tools for development. I don't see why one would pass up JetBrains IDEs considering they have a passable Vim mode and for the languages they have plugins and/or product lines for they're just better.
Yes, but that's different. You are judging people by their output, not by their tools, and that's just fine.
I've seen people produce absolute miracles using fairly archaic tools showing a very deep level of understanding of both the problem and the domain. Forcing them into some kind of straightjacket to use 'modern tools' would be the same as taking Itzhak Perlman's Soil Stradivarius away to force him to play on an electric violin just to get with the times.
For things like formatting/finding bugs, shouldn't those be command line tools anyway, so they can be built into your CI?
Even if not, there's no reason not to allow someone to edit text however they like, and then just load their changes into Intellij or whatever to double-check formatting and use its static analysis tools before raising a pull request.
> I don't see why one would pass up JetBrains IDEs considering they have a passable Vim mode and for the languages they have plugins and/or product lines for they're just better.
I use Intellij at work for Java stuff, and I could easily see why someone would want to use something less resource intensive (especially for less IDE-dependent languages than Java). I regularly run into issue where I get pauses while I type.
This may only apply to junior people. Take James Gosling's super dense style of coding and disregard for style guides. These ultimate geeks would just leave.
Besides, I'd love to see you make your case to HR: "I want to fire this person because they don't edit their text like I do".
Good luck with your career as a boss.