On the other hand, the only usable Intellisense engines or debugger integrations I tried have been built for Emacs and not Vim. This is mostly because, by desig

On the other hand, the only usable Intellisense engines or debugger integrations I tried have been built for Emacs and not Vim. This is mostly because, by design, offloading tasks to other processes without blocking the gui-thread is easier to do in Emacs. Also Vim really needs good integration with other languages such as Python, because Vimscript is simply awful. There are problems with Emacs. First, Elisp is kind of an outdated and dirty Lisp dialect. It's kind of neat for extending Emacs, but it's also a poor Lisp dialect by modern standards. I would love an alternative to Emacs built on top of Scheme, with its awesome continuations support, or on top of Clojure. The other problem I'm seeing is that Emacs, as awesome as it may be, is also outdated in what it can do. Smalltalk set a high bar long ago in what IDEs can do and Smalltalk IDEs still haven't been surpassed in terms of experimental development that people tend to do in REPLs nowadays. Having something like a Smalltalk IDE, that uses realtime feedback and visuals to aid in learning, discovery or debugging, with the same philosophy of Emacs (e.g. open-source, totally customizable, turtles all the way down, transcending languages or operating-systems, etc...) would be priceless. This is why I have high hopes for Light Table [1], hopefully it will bear fruits as planned by its author. [1] http://lighttable.com http://lighttable.com