I did spend a lot of time with Vim but never got to the point where I had all my plugin issues solved. Eventually I moved mostly back to Sublime with Vim emulation, and very recently have moved again to VS Code with Vim emulation, and I'm quite happy.
Long time "lightweight" VIM user with gvim, using tabs, and often two windows (sessions)...
On OS X, MacVim was a delight.
Since I had to swiych back to Windows, and I use VirtualBox, gvim is really slow. It also has some nasty rendering issues due to its underlying gtk framework intercaction with the Virtual Box Guest Additions. The only work around I found was some obscure tweaks in the Compiz Comfing Settings Manager (CCSM) related to screen redraws. Spent hours and hours installing different VMs, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, etc. and trying to isolate the problem in Virtual Box.
Finally recently I heard about Sublime Text... it runs SO MUCH BETTER than gvim in a Ubuntu VM.
And.. icing on the cake... I discover it has a "vintage" mode that covers pretty much everything I used (ci" to replace inside strings, dt; to "delete till ;", vit to select visual inside tag, etc. It seems to support a lot more than the documentation says.
To top it off it appears to be very configurable as well.
All in all I genuinely wonder why you'd not want to use the editor? Because it's paid? It doesn't even enforce you to buy the software, which is prety gracious of the developer.
But honestly.. what started getting on my nerves.. is whenever I'd visit discussions about vim and you always have the same clique who point out how using the mouse is "inefficient" and how using vim inside terminal is the only true way of using vim, and how using tabs is "slow" compared to their way of switching buffers, etc. I suppose you can gleefully ignore these comments but it makes you question in the end if you are using an editor out of ideology. If I stick to Sublime Text I will definitely not miss those inane topics.
The main thing I don't like in Sublime Text so far are:
- the search replace UI... I much preferred the %s// way of doing things. ( but for multi file refactoring I much prefer a special tool for that like "regexxer" )
- the over abundance of auto completion. Unfortunately whenever a dev creates some autocomplete plugin they always feel as if it is the right thing to do to complete EVERYTHING. Well it makes "logical" sense to them, to scrape a source like mozilla MDN, or the specs sheets. And then they may even proudly describe how their plugin covers everything AND MORE .. including css properties or javascript syntax that isn't even implemented yet.
.. So TLDR I find out half the time I try to complete something I end up spending more time undoing the clusterfuck and it makes me wonder why I use it at all. I wish devs understood the 80/20 rule and make the completion work for the 80% case, so that the editor actually serves the user instead of slowing you down. How the heck do you remember everything that can be completed? THere is simply too many possibilities so you never know quite what will happen.
.. So now I need to find the setting in Sublime to auto complete only what is in all my open files and nothing else, and it's probably much more meaningful that way. Since when you add to a project, you'll end up reusing a lot of the functions both self made, and those often used from an API.
That's my rant for the day =)
PS:
But seriously Sublime + Vintage mode maeks it easy to switch from vim if necessary. The settings are:
"ignored_packages":
[
// (dont ignore "Vintage"
]
"vintage_start_in_command_mode": truethat would be the AllAutocomplete plugin, it does exactly that :) afaik it's the only autocompletion I use, for pretty much the reasons you said.