Yes, you can't achieve the same thing without the plugins. You also can't achieve the interactive debuggers that IDEs have. But have you missed those? After som

Yes, you can't achieve the same thing without the plugins. You also can't achieve the interactive debuggers that IDEs have. But have you missed those? After some time I bet you've found other ways to debug your code that are just as handy, maybe not in all cases but therefore are even better in others. When I started to miss debuggers it forced me to really learn strace, logging frameworks of my favorite languages, dmesg, and journalctl filtering. It's still more work than setting up a breakpoint and tabbing through my code, but on the other hand I have it available as well, when I need to debug a wordpress plugin a contract worker wrote for my customer 10 years ago on a webserver that has none of my usual settings, plugins etc. In the end the pros and cons equal out I'd say. And let's assume we can agree on that: Great plugins and great skill can on average be just as good. Why do I think that in vim plugins are the wrong course? Because everything in vim is based around skill. You can't even navigate efficiently without spending some time learning search, word/block navigation, etc. If one wants to achieve success with plugins I'd say it's much smarter to build your tools on a foundation that is created for plugins like emacs or an IDE.