It just reminds me of serious men with beards working on mainframes and AIX power systems when I started my career.
I think this might be only superficially true. One of the meta-features of vim/emacs is, over months and years of use, they slowly teach you how IDEs "work", and invite you to tweak how yours works to your whim.
example: I notice a process is slow in vim. I'm able to profile the problem, identify the binary responsible, replace it with a faster equivalent program, and enjoy that improvement for the rest of my life. Such a thing may be possible in VS Code, but it's against the norm of "just install this plugin", whereas it is the norm in vim/emacs-world.
Some other scattered ideas:
I also think that, since vim and emacs are fundamentally cli tools also gives them an advantage, because you can hook them in to your terminal workflows (git add -p, git commit -v, etc). also, you can dispatch terminal commands seamlessly from inside vim (I get `make build` in two keystrokes: `,d`).
vim (I can't speak for emacs, don't use it) is also more responsive with a much smaller resource footprint and an equivalent feature set. my work laptop can run a web browser and vim for 6+ hours. With vs code, maybe 3 hours.
Because it integrates so well into this environment it can be used as the editor step in other scripts/tools like how it is used in git commit messages. As a quick example of how this can be used here is a script I made for working with tab separated files:
tmpout="$1.tmp"
cat $1 | sed "s/\\t/~|/g" | column -t -s~ | \
vim -c 'set nowrap' - +"file $tmpout"
if [[ -f $tmpout ]]; then
<$tmpout sed "s/\\s*|\\s*/\\t/g" > $1
rm $tmpout
fi
Another reason is that I really enjoy that vim runs in my terminal. I can easily toggle in and out of vim while doing heavy terminal work, and if I want to rapidly open and close different files while looking around for things vim makes it simple.
There might be an aesthetic or comfort aspect to it, but most tools don't stay as relevant as vim has for mere style points.
ci" == delete everything within these quotes, and put me in insert mode. vi{:%s/old_var_name/new_var_name/g == rename a variable within a block qaI"<ESC>A",<ESC>jq == make a new macro to quote a line of text and add a comma at the end. Great for taking a bunch of strings I've copied from a text file and putting them into a list in code. But the point here is not this specific macro; I can do all sorts of minor text processing macros for the dumb thing I have to do, and not manually process 100 lines of text to turn it into a piece of json.
However, there's also times when I don't have the luxury of using an IDE or when I just need to make quick edits to a single file. In these circumstances, I can just fire up vim and quickly do what I need to do because vim is ubiquitous and editing with it is efficient.