Vim is just one piece of the puzzle, it's the editor in the IDE that is unix. Tools like VSCode and IDE's take over too many responsibilities and usually do an

Vim is just one piece of the puzzle, it's the editor in the IDE that is unix. Tools like VSCode and IDE's take over too many responsibilities and usually do an inferior job. VSCode will do the window management for instance, opening new tabs for files, file list windows, terminal windows, etc. My desktop environment (dwm or tmux) is much better at this and universal for non development tasks as well. Another bug bear of mine (this one doesn't apply to VSCode) is IDEs that want to be the build system instead of my much more powerful Makefiles. Because it integrates so well into this environment it can be used as the editor step in other scripts/tools like how it is used in git commit messages. As a quick example of how this can be used here is a script I made for working with tab separated files: tmpout="$1.tmp" cat $1 | sed "s/\\t/~|/g" | column -t -s~ | \ vim -c 'set nowrap' - +"file $tmpout" if [[ -f $tmpout ]]; then <$tmpout sed "s/\\s*|\\s*/\\t/g" > $1 rm $tmpout fi In 7 lines of code I made it a half decent tsv editor in part of a larger system, replacing the million excel windows others were using.