This is why I, and I suspect many others, like terminal based text editors like vim (or emacs, whatever. Our war is against GUI before each other). I find IDEs have too much going on and any little blip on the side shifts my focus. Whereas with vim/tmux/zsh I can highly and easily customize my environment to... __me__. About everything an IDE offers I also get[0], but with more ease in having it placed where I want and __when__ I want. I can have a project drawer visible or push it away with NerdTree or use netrw (native) or vimfiler as an explorer. I have tags, linters, smart autocomplete (native), color bracket matching, git, buffers, panes, marks, and all that. All that with trees and interfaces to view in code or quickly turn things off if they are distracting (e.g. pull up my tag tree when reading code or referencing a signature but shove it away when not).
But the best feature is that I can can make it most readable to me. Not only that, but also to the project. I am a true believer that coding environments __should__ be highly personalized. Standardization seems to be a death sentence, especially for ADHD/neurodivergent people like me. I definitely get the sentiment of intent to be shittier over time too. Systems like VSCode feel impenetrable to me despite numerous attempts and strong insistence to use them from many others. (I'm sure this can be true of vim/emacs to others but my argument is about customizing your environment to you, not the tool you use for that)
[0] realistically there's only two things I want that I haven't found: 1) a (good) debugger, and 2) a note system. There are definitely debuggers for vim and useful ones but I've always felt debuggers could be more useful and this isn't just a vim issue. Which, a connection to the second thing, I'd love if I could make notes to specific lines of code in a popup or split and that the note has a mark on that line wherein I can go back and forth. This is immensely helpful when debugging where I'm usually sitting with a piece of paper and drawing[1] and writing notes and often in that I notice optimization or other opportunities that I should come back to later but are not prioritized in the "make it work first" mode (or else rabbit hole). (Minor 3rd thing: in line python execution. Like I want to test a single line or small block. `python -i` can help but just doing this easily would be nice)
[1] Do people not like call graphs? It seems they're rather unpopular and the interfaces that draw them tend to be really bad. Maybe I just haven't found a good one? Mostly work with python fwiw.
> I'd love if I could make notes to specific lines of code in a popup or split and that the note has a mark on that line wherein I can go back and forth.
Emacs does this with a feature called "bookmarks". I don't use vim particularly so can't vouch for anything, but https://github.com/MattesGroeger/vim-bookmarks looks like the same concepts I'm thinking of in a vim-flavored implementation - maybe worth a look.
But the best feature is that I can can make it most readable to me. Not only that, but also to the project. I am a true believer that coding environments __should__ be highly personalized. Standardization seems to be a death sentence, especially for ADHD/neurodivergent people like me. I definitely get the sentiment of intent to be shittier over time too. Systems like VSCode feel impenetrable to me despite numerous attempts and strong insistence to use them from many others. (I'm sure this can be true of vim/emacs to others but my argument is about customizing your environment to you, not the tool you use for that)
[0] realistically there's only two things I want that I haven't found: 1) a (good) debugger, and 2) a note system. There are definitely debuggers for vim and useful ones but I've always felt debuggers could be more useful and this isn't just a vim issue. Which, a connection to the second thing, I'd love if I could make notes to specific lines of code in a popup or split and that the note has a mark on that line wherein I can go back and forth. This is immensely helpful when debugging where I'm usually sitting with a piece of paper and drawing[1] and writing notes and often in that I notice optimization or other opportunities that I should come back to later but are not prioritized in the "make it work first" mode (or else rabbit hole). (Minor 3rd thing: in line python execution. Like I want to test a single line or small block. `python -i` can help but just doing this easily would be nice)
[1] Do people not like call graphs? It seems they're rather unpopular and the interfaces that draw them tend to be really bad. Maybe I just haven't found a good one? Mostly work with python fwiw.