I’ve been through a long parade of editors and IDEs over the years, and each phase almost feels like a snapshot of where I was as a developer at the time. Back at university the big names were NetBeans and Eclipse—heavy, clunky, but they got the job done and felt “proper” in an academic setting.
When I moved into the Ruby world, the tool everyone raved about was RubyMine (a JetBrains product). And for good reason: it did everything for you—refactors, navigation, inspections. For a while, it felt like the most grown-up way to write Ruby.
But I kept bumping into these YouTube videos of people practically gliding through code in Vim or Emacs. No mouse, no ceremony, just pure speed. They made it look like wizardry. Eventually curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to teach myself Vim. It was painful at first—when you start, you genuinely don’t know how to quit, which feels like a metaphor for the entire learning curve.
But once the modal editing philosophy clicked, something shifted. I started shaping my own config instead of relying on someone else’s mega-distribution. Every keybind had a purpose, every plugin earned its place, and over the years it became a tool that fit my hands perfectly. Today, for Ruby, I wouldn’t use anything else. Vim just feels like an extension of my brain.
That said, IDEs still have their place. If I’m writing Java, for example, a full JetBrains IDE is undeniably better for certain kinds of refactoring and analysis. Some languages just benefit more from all the tooling an IDE can provide.
But for my day-to-day coding, Vim is home.
Curious to hear what everyone else here is using—and what brought you to it.
