I hardly ever use gvim. From my understanding, there are a few relatively minor GUI specific settings for the GUI version. Contrast that to emacs. It's possible

I hardly ever use gvim. From my understanding, there are a few relatively minor GUI specific settings for the GUI version. Contrast that to emacs. It's possible to present documents with multiple fonts and images in the graphical version. (The irony: vim and gvim are separate binaries, which emacs can have a unified CLI/GUI binary.) I agree that heavily customized, emacs and vim can be an IDE and that it can be distracting. It is possible to pick and choose the desirable (e.g. non-distracting) elements of an IDE when configuring either editor, but that in itself turns into a distraction.