About six years ago, we ran a piece about IDEs where the gist was that IDEs were getting to be so powerful and capable that it was a marvel that anybody used Vim or Emacs like a caveman. While yes, it was a provocative article, it got a lot of developers pretty riled up. Comments came from both sides, both from folks trashing the article for not understanding how developers work and from those developers who preach the good news of Emacs all day. But mostly there was a great discussion about why these tools were actually useful. For a novice, Vim and Emacs can seem like unintuitive terminal programs that require memorization of secret keystrokes to use (and escape ). But for the experienced user, it can feel as natural as thinking. One comment pointed to The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt, which explained that developers—craftsmen that they are (or were) —need “sharp tools” that feel like an extension of their hand.…