I’m relatively new to programming, I’ve been learning C on linux using nano and it’s been very fun. I’ve recently fallen into the emacs/vim rabbithole and I’ve been watching videos about emacs, Doom, spacemacs, neovim and reading comments about people switching from this or that to another config or editor, and I’ve been a bit lost on what to do. Then I realised that I haven’t done any coding and spent all of my time focusing on editors. So here is my question (which has probably been asked many times) : what is the point of investing so much time learning all of this when there are some IDEs that are preconfigured with all the functionality a programmer would need ? Does learning neovim or emacs actually save time in the long run? I know that they’re much more lightweight than IDEs and I’ve been really enjoying using the terminal much more than my time on IntelliJ, but having an easy out of the box visual debugger, refactoring and jump into functions can be really helpful in the long run I think, especially when starting to write actual large programs. Nano is fun, but not a time saver. Why did you chose your editor?
There’s nothing saying you have to use one editor. My main editor is VSCode, but if I need to say edit a config variable on my server, or hot fix a script, knowing Vim is useful. Or I might use Rider for C#, etc. Vim (and emacs, nano and others) are usually always available on Linux servers, making it very quick to poke around, which makes them attractive to a lot of linux enthusiasts.
Choose the editor you find the best for the current job. If you prefer the full IDE experience, go for it. If you want a lighter editor, then use that. If you just want to learn the different terminal editors, there’s no fault in that, it can be fun to master something.
Agreed, different editors give different look and feel. An IDE is good because of lots of clever things it can do, but most of them could be replicated in Vim with proper plugins.
Though to be hones I never had the nerve to properly set up Vim, so use it only for small scale stuff :-)
Regarding Vim vs Emacs vs Any other editor it all boils down to what you will like more, although you should probably give it a bit more than one time to get better acquainted woth the quirks and advantages of a specific variant.