Recently I started a job…
In the past, I was a heavy VSCode user. That was a nice experience. I loved VSCode. It’s fast, stable, pretty, configurable, and easily extendable. It doesn’t require you to do anything to get started. Need a Vue support? Ctrl+Shift+X type vue and the first plugin would probably be an official and excellent tool. Same with React, GraphQL, Deno, you name it. VSCode has a large community and lots of issues closed and open, so if you encounter a problem it shouldn’t take a while to find something useful or right away a fix.
If there wasn’t a necessity, I wouldn’t switch from VSCode.
Take on the other hand - Vim. To get started you must learn at least how to exit it. Then movements, replacements, searching, and so on… After that, you will need to ✨configure✨ your setup to at least enable some syntax highlighting. You won’t get any autocompletion, highlighting, LSP, hints, file-tree, or icons out of the box. That will also require some plugins installed… Probably I’ve spent more time configuring Vim, than VSCode, despite using VSCode for 5+ years(?) and 4-5 months Vim. And sometimes strange things happen to Vim, some plugin stops working after an update or something else just doesn’t work. You will need to take a deep dive into stackoverflow, neovim issues, or some blog posts from 2004.
I would say that Vim is addictive, maybe not the Vim itself, but it’s movements, it’s quickness and lightness. After you learn some even basic movements and get used to them, it becomes difficult to use normal text editing tools (like VSCode). Almost every move or action is one key away from your fingers. There is no need to shift your hands to arrows or mouse every now and then. Start-up or even code actions become faster. With Vim you become faster. But, is the time spent configuring, getting used to keys, and fixing issues worth all of it? I don’t know… I always wanted to learn it, and I knew that sometime in the future it would happen. But every time I tried, I switched soon back to VSCode, because I didn’t see the value of using it (yes, skill issue).
Now I’m a happy Neovim user, with custom config. I would probably never use VSCode again (maybe Zed ?). Use whatever works for you, never stop learning and writing code. Vim wouldn’t make you a better developer.
Hope to get back here soon, bye 👋.