>>How does a programmer evaluate this machine without discussing at least one of vi and emacs, and the absence of real Esc and Fn keys?
What percentage of programmers use vi or emacs?
What percentage of programmers use vi or emacs?
I would say maybe 1% of developers actually use them as an IDE given how poor they are compared to something like IntelliJ or Visual Studio.
Depends on the language, some of them are IDE friendly, e.g. Java, C#, Eiffel, VB, Delphi, C++ Builder,
When Visual Studio Code came out, the VIM extension was one of the most sought after.
If you get used to editing vim or the extreme ease of laying out windows on the fly, jumping between window configurations and saving UIs in emacs, then even IntelliJ seems quite old-fashioned. I've tried 3 times to switch to CLion by JetBrains and every time I immediately miss all the ways emacs has streamlined my development life. (I use emacs with vim-emulation)
Vim keyboard macros (supported in emacs), the use of the "." key for all kinds of editing magic, and other things are extreme improvements over old-school editing that most "modern" editors use. The makers of VS Studio seem to think that a better autocompletion is going to improve the lives of developers, and other similar cockpit-like features. It's just basic text editing prowess that actually improves their lives, and that is where vim and emacs shine.