I believe they're referring to the fact that vim + the OS itself (generally some flavor of *nix) can do whatever an IDE can do. From a terminal, one can call vi

I believe they're referring to the fact that vim + the OS itself (generally some flavor of *nix) can do whatever an IDE can do. From a terminal, one can call vim, gdb, valgrind, navigate file trees, utilize grep for searching codebases for a string, and so on.