I'm an unabashed Vim user. It has been my primary editor for over seven years now, when I switched to it to make it easier to edit files over SSH. At the time, I made myself use it exclusively for a month so that the habits would be ingrained, and took the time to go through vimtutor as well as to order and read Steve Oualline's Vim book. And when I say "exclusively," I mean it — I switched to using Mutt for email at that time, and also started doing all code development, outlining, and more in vim. And after a month, I realized I didn't want to use anything else.

Ironically, I find myself working for a company that sells an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). As a result, I've done some test runs with Eclipse, Zend Studio for Eclipse, and even NetBeans, to see what features they offer and to see if there would be anything compelling that might make me change my mind.

One of the immediate sticking points for me is that my brain is now hardwired to edit text a certain way. I use my home row keys to navigate through a document (as it's wicked efficient), switch to visual mode to highlight text (even more fun is highlighting specific columns!), and more. This has driven me to try a number of plugins for the aforementioned editors that add 'vi' or 'vim' capabilities to them.

I've tried the following:

• Eclim (Eclipse)
• Vwrapper (Eclipse)
• jVi (NetBeans)

So far, they universally fail.

Why? Because they reimplement vi(m) keybindings, but don't actually re-use anything from vim itself. Why does this matter? Because this means the tools completely ignore the entire vim ecosystem. Vim has a wealth of user plugins, syntax highlighting codecs, filetype plugins, and other utilities — and you can use none of them. Vim allows you to create your own keybindings, and provides a language for creating your own plugins… and you cannot use them. Vim allows you to specify your own settings in a configuration file — these tools not only ignore the file, but have no ability to source it whatsoever.

As an example, I have bound jj to the <Esc> key. This micro-optimization prevents me from needing to reach outside my home row in order to switch modes. I cannot use this in eclim. I have bound <Ctrl>-L to the linter in a variety of languages; I cannot use this in vwrapper. I use a plugin to autocreate phpdoc docblocks; I cannot use this in jVi. Basically, each of these tools provides what I consider a crippled version of vim, as I cannot do things I would do in vim.

What these tools are trying to do is make the IDE environment more familiar to vim users — as far as I can see, it's more like a migration tool. "See — you can make it look and act a lot like vim! Now that you're here, maybe you should try some of our other features!"

And that's where the final nail in the coffin occurs, to my thinking, because there's one thing vim does that no other IDE I've tried is capable of: it loads in under a second. I often want to look something up in my code. Do I wait for my IDE to startup? or, once loaded, do I peform a variety of mouse convolutions to find the file I want to see? Or do I simply open up vim and use c-tags to load my file in 1 or 2 seconds?

In summary, these projects fail because they make you long for something you already had: a fast, extensible editor.

So, all in all, while I think these projects are interesting, I think it makes more sense to either go total immersion in the IDE, or go back to your editor of choice. I know which one will be in my own toolbox for many years to come.