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I'm honestly confused at how much effort people spend on .vimrc and .emacs filesI'm not sure how this criticism applies to the post; it's a single plugin that adds language-server capabilities that almost every IDE is using today.
> Want to dev in Rust? Get IntelliJ Community Edition (free) with the Rust plugin.
Alternatively, if you use vim, you can just as easily download the popular rust.vim plugin which was written specifically for vim by the rust development team.
poor versions of that comes out of the box with the most basic of IDEs.
The functionality isn't "poor" or in "narrow slices"; with few exceptions Vim is fully capable in terms of IDE features and actually exceeds what is possible with most IDEs individually. Products like the IntelliJ suite of editors will always have more "out of the box" features because their business model is selling IDEs with lots of features. IMO the vanilla editor + plugin model is superior because it allows you to select your features a la carte as they make sense for your workflow rather than being thrown into a bundle of different features, many of which you don't need and most of which you'll never use. With Vim, every feature is deliberate and the experience can be super lightweight or relatively heavy, but ultimately customizable to the point of perfection. Of course, tweaking Vim to be your perfect IDE takes time, but that's the tradeoff for a self-tailored experience vs one that was designed for you based on someone else's ideal workflow. There's nothing wrong with just picking something off the shelf and learning it, but some people want to optimize their workflow and most people end up switching IDEs over time anyway, so I think the idea that you can simply learn one thing and use it forever isn't typical.
> I just don't write code that way and don't know why someone would.
I prefer it because its fast, clean, open source all-the-way-down, and I can manage and access my entire development environment remotely from any machine, with full fidelity and capabilities. Tty applications also combine beautifully with tmux allowing me to arrange my editor into tight visual coordination with other commonly related tasks that are specific to the context of the files i'm editing (e.g. tailing logs, running binaries/scripts, copying/moving files). Additionally, tty applications tend to integrate very well with eachother since the designers tend to have an appreciation for the the unix philosophy.