I definitely understand what you're saying, and personally at work I use Xcode (with XVim installed). But I think there is this huuuge group of people that enj

I definitely understand what you're saying, and personally at work I use Xcode (with XVim installed). But I think there is this huuuge group of people that enjoy the integrations. Xcode can't do much besides be a pretty GUI for clang and lldb. If that's enough for a developer, then Xcode is perfect. If a user likes some more customization and integration than just that, then they're out of luck. For Xcode, there are some very basic plugins, used by people who just need Xcode + some small adjustment (eg. me wanting some vi bindings). On the other hand, for vim and emacs, there are plugins for anything and everything, from irc to mail to ordering salads for launch [0]. When a user is comfortable enough and wants to live inside their editor, then I don't think vim and emacs can be beat by any other modern editor/IDE. Maybe atom will be the new emacs in a few years.. who knows :) [0]: https://github.com/CestDiego/sweetgreen.el https://github.com/CestDiego/sweetgreen.el