This is so off base and irrationally elitist, you really just don't see how wrong it is.

These tools do SO MUCH more than just give you a GUI for a coding system. Code analysis, preventative suggestions, and a common look and feel for people switching languages and stacks.

Yes, a lot of it can be cobbled together with open source tooling and scripts and blah blah but I want to spend my time getting shit done, not writing code to be able to write code. The 100$ a year was well worth it for the suite I had, and even double that would still be an irrelevant amount of money to me with my engineering salary.

Time is money, saving time - not just my own, but the time of others on my team using similar tooling - is worth spending a little money and dropping snobbish elitism based on nothing stronger than "I must be smart because I know how something works".

Here to remind you that real men don’t need compilers. What, you can’t remember every CPU extension? On the latest intel chip from 2000.

What’s that, newer chips offer more features out of the box? How lazy of you.

I spent four years in college studying CS. 2.5 of those years building massively parallel real-time fpga/dsp systems from almost scratch. Even had to build our own boards. Except I didn’t use Emacs. I’m so retarded.

I’m a big user of both Vim and Emacs and agree that they offer huge productivity boosts as editors. The speed that modal editing (Vim) gives you or the extensibility of Emacs is unparalleled.

But at the same time I believe it’s naive to underestimate the productivity offered by IDEs such as IntelliJ or Pycharm. While news tools such as LSP are wonderful additions to Vil/Emacs, the experience doesn’t come close to what dedicated IDEs offer.

My personal flow is to use Vim for true editing, which gives me the power of modal editing, and switch to a full IDE when I need to do extensive refactoring or need code insights or need powerful debugging offered by an IDE.

That's incredibly dismissive, and if you think that about any of JetBrain's software, I'm unsure about your qualifications to judge anyone's productivity.

I wish there was a modern terminal-first IDE that has the same amount of backing as VSCode or Jetbrains IDEs. While I enjoy vim's speed and modal editing, the number of barely working plugins that break if you so much as look at it wrong is what keeps driving me back to VSCode + Vim emulator.

I'd rather train a butterfly to do the job

James Gosling, which knows a thing or two about Emacs, thinks otherwise.

Can vim or eMacs provide auto completion when they detect an SQL query within a string in any language, based on an actual database schema that is connected?

i dunno about vim or emacs, but they surely don't compare to intellij IDEA for java support.