IMO neither of them are really "Swiss army knives". Multitools are pretty bad as actual tools, we just use them because carrying around an entire toolbox is nut

IMO neither of them are really "Swiss army knives". Multitools are pretty bad as actual tools, we just use them because carrying around an entire toolbox is nuts. It's not the versatility that makes them good, it's the form factor. If I had to compare tech to real life tools, then IDEs would be food processors: heavy, extremely good at what they do, make some things possible and other things trivial, best at scale. And vim would be, I dunno, a really nice chef's knife? But you can't serrate a chef's knife. Whatever, analogies are dumb. (Emacs of course would be a smart fridge running emacs as an OS.)