I have two comments to make before detailing my workflow: * You already have experience with one of the greatest programing-oriented text editors so why don't

I have two comments to make before detailing my workflow: * You already have experience with one of the greatest programing-oriented text editors so why don't you just keep using it? * An environment is what you get after you have solved your problems, satisfied your needs, optimized your workflows. Not something you start with. Now, I've been doing (web front-end) development since the late nineties and only switched to Vim from TextMate 8 years ago. I run Vim in a terminal emulator with only a few plugins. Half of them are mine, essentially snippets of code I extracted from my config for others to use. For moving around a project I generally avoid file-based navigation in favor of the built-in "symbol-based navigation" features: :help include-search, :help tags, and :help ctags. For ctags, I let my task runner take care of the indexing. For linting I use the built-in :help 'makeprg', :help 'errorformat', and :help quickfix. For livereload I currently use Webpack Dev Server on every front-end project at work. This happens outside of Vim, as it should. For manual completion (I hate autocompletion) I just use the built-in :help ins-completion with custom mappings. I use snippet expansion a lot via the Snipmate plugin (there are others). No Tmux. No Git integration. No fancy statusline. No line numbers. No unnecessary plugin. Nothing more than a soothing and familiar dark grey rectangle.