I did a lot of work in unassisted vim when I was in university, and I would say the answer is twofold: - you become a proficient user of tabs in whatever IDE o

I did a lot of work in unassisted vim when I was in university, and I would say the answer is twofold: - you become a proficient user of tabs in whatever IDE or text editor or window manager you use. you open up header files (or collapsed source files, depending on the language/IDE) and reference the API you use. - you get better at naming things. You don't need to guess the name of any specific API, because it makes sense within the context of your codebase. I believe this makes you a better programmer.