There have been a lot of replies addressing a few of your concerns, I will attempt to hit all of them. The only one that really has any no great solution is th

There have been a lot of replies addressing a few of your concerns, I will attempt to hit all of them. The only one that really has any no great solution is the refactoring support. > * no tabs There actually are tabs, but they probably don't work the way you expect, they are closer to viewports or workspaces, but they are there. You can also use assorted plugins to improve tabs and/or emulate them. > * no project structure Not sure I understand this way -- no enforced structure? Neither to IDEs, no tree viewer -- there are bunches of tree based file viewers. > * in my IDE (eclipse based or intellij based) I can ctrl-click a class/object/other to navigate into that object's definition This is supported by the tags system in Vim, which depends on ctags. :tselect, C-], lots more -- this exists out of the box. > * in my IDE I can search for classnames, I can press ctrl-T to find who inherits from something, ctrl-alt-H to find who uses something etc... This obviously very specific to some language you have in your head, as many of those things don't make sense in some languages. That said, this is supported in various languages by various plugins (In Go, Oracle for example). > when I find myself actually writing code, it's usually a line or two in each of several files (because modern programming paradigms tell us we should split code as much as possible), or modifying some copy pasted snippet I found on google - so navigation is extremely important even when editing. Agreed, which is why Vim has so many ways from jump-to-def to jump-to-file to various smart plugins for rails and C and <X>. > * auto-complete(with annotation to tell you what the function variables are) Gobs of plugins do this for Vim -- normally language specific and they tend to work rather great. > * debug inside your IDE See Clewn, full gdb support integrated with vim. > * run code-lint, auto-build on typing to detect errors, etc... Vim has all of that, syntastic will show errors in the left bar as you type, setting things to autorun is trivial, all major languages already have this. > * auto refactor (I.E. extract method, move variable, extract class etc...) Language specific (as is your IDE's features, because to do requires understand the language), but this exists in limited form for Go and C++ -- and I am sure others. The level isn't up to major IDEs. That said, many of these things are easily scriptable in vim. > * format all your files according to your pre-specified project guideline. Tons of vim support for this, even supporting standard 3rd party like EditorConfig. > * sharing you IDE configuration with other contributors I think you will find far more vimrc files shared in the wild than any IDE. > * showing when files are/aren't in version control and integrating version control so that you view history in your IDE. Fugitive has great time travel features for flipping through versions of files and seeing differences. Use git-nerdtree to add git status to nerdtree.