After about four years of using Vim, I'm starting to see it's more of a paradigm (and almost a philosophy) built into an editor, rather than the editor itself.

After about four years of using Vim, I'm starting to see it's more of a paradigm (and almost a philosophy) built into an editor, rather than the editor itself. One thing many people complain about when they switch to Vim is editor's inability to understand their code unless they set up exuberant ctags, etc. Even then, the code completion (omnicomplete, supertab, etc) isn't to the grade of commercial IDEs. It's only in the past few months, I've realized that every major IDE out there - from Visual Studio to Netbeans have plugins to enable vi-mode. Heck, many popular ones like QT Creator, KDevelop, MonoDevelop have Vi mode baked in right into the IDE itself, ensuring a high degree of integration. This gives you the best of all worlds - you get an intelligent, yet efficient editor. A lot of projects exist, like VimWrapper[1], which enable application developers to embed Vim, or to emulate its functionality without excessive efforts and re-implementing the same code again and again. The Netbeans protocol in Vim is still used by editors like Pida to skillfully embed the entire editor, and there are great projects like Eclim, which prove the degree of integration Vim can have with its environment despite the governing policy discouraging interaction with external tools. Personally, I switched to Emacs for two months (or tried) but found that with some tweaking, most of what can be accomplished by Emacs can be done using GVim. I feel, that with a little effort, the vi-emulation in Emacs itself can make for a better generic editing experience than either of the standard editors.