__EDIT__: "tabs" not "windows" sorry. I mixed up I use vim as my main IDE and I consider splits to be essential in vim too. About that, I understand the point

__EDIT__: "tabs" not "windows" sorry. I mixed up I use vim as my main IDE and I consider splits to be essential in vim too. About that, I understand the point other people make about using tmux or a tiling wm instead, but this generally means that the register are not shared between those vim instances, which is a huge penalty for me. "Essential power user features" could be different things for me. For now, I would say using the multiple registers, macros, navigating the undo tree and marks to be both essential and advanced (they are not hard to understand, but you have to remember a lot of things before you dive into all that). But with vim, you often discover new features after years of usage which become essential when you integrate it in your workflow and muscle memories. For example, I never really grasped the "tabs" concepts and its use cases for now, but I wouldn't be surprised if I make heavy usage of them in the future. I would thus guess that other vim users might have very different answers.