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>But as a product, both of them appear to be quite similar

Not at all. Not even in the same league. Emacs is the Emacs of the 21st century. Vim is a text-editor and never claimed to be an IDE, so I don't understand the "lying to yourself" bit.

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Well some people claim that vim can do whatever an IDE can, which is just not true. That comment was directed towards those people.

I believe they're referring to the fact that vim + the OS itself (generally some flavor of *nix) can do whatever an IDE can do. From a terminal, one can call vim, gdb, valgrind, navigate file trees, utilize grep for searching codebases for a string, and so on.

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