I'm a vim user turned JetBrains user. I still use IDEAVim inside of all of the JetBrains offerings. I go back and forth wanting to purely use vim but I can't warrant all of the config overhead. To me that's the biggest reason not to use pure vim instead of a vimulator.

The vim ecosystem reminds me of the node ecosystem. It's a choose your own adventure approach. Yes, there are wonderful and powerful tools, but it's always a shotgun of plugins to get a solution for each language you want to support. With JetBrains, I get 90% of the tooling I need for the language I'm using out of the box. The other 10% can be handled by plugins and some small configuration changes.

I'm posting this because I want to be convinced otherwise. Here are the JetBrains features that I can't live without:

  - Contexts: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/managing-tasks-and-context.html#work-with-context

    - Re > I'm usually working with a 6 to 8 way split. Kind of like the tabs on my browser.

  - VCS tooling

    - Handles multiple git repos from a top level. I can commit across all repos or a single repo selectively

    - File change view

    - Merging view

    - Per line commit selection

  - Inbuilt database tooling

    - Ad hoc queries and output directly next to the code you're prototyping
  
    - Database introspection
  
  - Symbol based refactoring

  - Visual debugger

  - Multiple module repo

    - You can configure a language/ecosystem per each directory in your project to get the associated tooling for each directory

  - Scratch files

  - Local history

    - This has saved my ass more than once. It's amazing how far back you can go outside of commit history with this.