"It's the fact that I need visual step-through debugging, adding breakpoints and watch points, and intuitive navigation through a large file hierarchy including

"It's the fact that I need visual step-through debugging, adding breakpoints and watch points, and intuitive navigation through a large file hierarchy including lots of imported files, HTML templates, config files, performing ad hoc database investigation queries, uploading files to a server, and whatever else, along with ability to jump to classes and function definitions and intelligent auto-complete and popping up parameters and catching my variable name typos and so forth." I know what you mean, but... Vim is first and foremost a text editor, and one could argue that none of this is a text editor's job. (In the spirit of the Unix tradition, do one thing and do it well, etc.) You can customize Vim a great deal, but it isn't really meant to do all of the above. I can see why you would choose to go with an IDE instead.