Just in case anyone reading here is as colossally ignorant as the writer, let me state for the record that emacs has those features. I don't use vim but I'm pretty sure it has them too. An accurate list of how newer IDEs benefit newbies follows:
1. Familiar key bindings
As a newbie you want to create a single-line Hello World program but the goddamn IDE wants you to create a workspace, and then within that workspace create a project, and within that project create a bunch of infests and manifests and resources and XML files, and pretty soon you're lost.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11828270/how-do-i-exit-t...
Once you grasp this concept, exiting vim is one of the most intuitive actions:
* [ESC] <- This is the "modal" part, the hard part, what you probably call unintuitive. * : <- The other part of "modal", difference between commands and navigation. Also a unique concept, that is not hard to grasp, but probably hard to know that one has to grasp it at all. * quit, exit, close * Some error may show up, telling you what to do instead, E.g. * :quit!
That is all: `[esc]:quit` a series of keystrokes that make little sense when you are not familiar with some basic concepts of vim. But entirely guessable, without reading a single line of help, if you do grasp the very basic concepts.
I was pointing out that the basic concepts like "modes", "commands" and "navigation" are unintuitive. But the commands, or navigation itself is not.
And from that, I state that it is not unintuitive to "close vim" in itself. But that "using vim at all" is.
This is another aspect. They suck up attention, which is a scarce resource. It is just like you start a web browser to look up some documentation, and it shows a dozen of interesting sites you might want to read because the browser developers got some money from these sites, or whatever.
Good software typically has a sparse feeling (depending on which are its intended users), in the sense that it does not distract.
But this is just a symptom of a bigger issue that they are not really friendly to the developer.
There are solutions for the others too. Neovim has for example support for the Language Server Protocol[3] that gives you code completion, jump to definition and the like.
The only thing with Vim/Emacs at this point is that you have to do some configuration and find some plugins to get the IDE features you want. For me personally, as I use Vim for everything, it's not that big of a deal.
[1]: https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive
If I had to describe it, I'd say it visually shows you your current git status and lets you manipulate it using an interface that provides a thin wrapper around git commands. It provides all the functionality of git in a convenient and discoverable way.
Your bias is showing. They never said that Vim/Emacs _doesn't_ have those. And modern IDEs generally make them much more discoverable and usable.
No-one is saying that "Vemacs" can't do everything that IDEs can do - they clearly can, with sufficient configuration, plugins, and so on. But the IDEs are generally "ready to go out-of-the-box"
Well, Emacs user interface and key bindings are by experience much more stable over time, especially if you consider that in ten year's time, that "new" IDE probably is probably not going to be around any more.
That also means that some default configurations do not have a "modern" feel like copy/paste key bindings. However stability in the long term is important for users of a complex and powerful program, which Emacs is. And if you want, you can always change the key bindings to your liking.
There are also options like the betterdefaults package which modernize bindings and add features without breaking anyones flow.
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[0] - I mean primarily the sense of "being paid for it".
[1] - Well, except for Eclipse. At least as of few years ago, default Eclipse had worse overall experience than even my worst beginner Emacs configs.