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Comment by joesmo | Hacker News Reader

Some people, myself included, use Jetbrains' IDEs much more heavily than the aforementioned editors. Personally, I love their IDEs and comparing them to the aforementioned editors is really unfair as the IDEs offer features that are simply impossible in text editors. Multi-select is one of the features that would make the aforementioned editors even more dispensable and the IDEs even better.

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Thanks! That answers my original question.

Now for the flamewar: Is there anything that a non-emacs/vim IDE or editor can do that both emacs and vim cannot? Aside from social inertia (e.g. your colleagues use it, it's your first and only power editor), I have a hard time understanding why anyone would use anything else.

My hunch is that it's primarily a marketing problem, especially for emacs.

Of course. Language specific code insight (real-time interactive static code analysis, essentially), navigation, context code completion, and refactoring (in whole project). I find these to be the most valuable features of IDEs. I'm not sure if vim/emacs can do multi-language syntax highlighting (for fixing that nasty spaghetti) and what their level of support for debugging is (through plugins), but those would be next on the list.

EDIT: As far as vim, it is supported in any decent IDE (including Jetbrains' ones), so in that sense, it can do a huge percentage of what vim can do as well (not sure about emacs).

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