Don't you get that fuzzy feeling when a tool doesn't work and you can't find a logical reason of why? Happened to me today. I recently switched to Kubuntu and it was actually a delightful experience, minus the Locale switch because for some reason it's still buggy after many years, anyways, I installed Eclipse CDT because I wanted to get started with C++ which is a language I have neglected for a while already. So when I open Eclipse I get constant crashes and freezes. I ditched OpenJDK just to be sure Eclipse wasn't just having trouble due to it, it fixed part of the problems but the thing keeps crashing. I'm like "well, it looks like the world is telling me to use vim or emacs". I gotta say though vim isn't a bad option even though I find their keymapping to be seriously nuts. Same goes for Emacs. Honestly Netbeans doesn't even work, and Eclipse is half broken. JetBrains, which is one of my favorite companies that do amazing IDEs (pycharm, intellij, etc) released today a C++ IDE and it's looking really splendid. As far as learning go, I don't need a professional tool. I might as well get this plugin for vim and hook it up with some stuff that helps me through debugging, etc.
VIM's keymapping is only nuts because you aren't used to it. When I first came over from Windows I had similar problems; it's just a learning curve. VIM has some very nice features. Have you taken a look at GVim? It's still VIM, but with a Gnome GUI so that it's a little more 'point-n-click'.
Hmm truth be told I've found myself to be a little faster using vim than emacs (although honestly I liked some emacs plugins but uh I'm pretty sure that both have a consistent plugins database to increase productivity which is what I adored of tools like PyCharm, PHPStorm when I was freelancing). GUI isn't a problem, I just use vim to edit configuration files most of the time since it's faster (basic usage of search/replace/duplication/ etc) I agree though, I'm not used to it.
To those curious you can learn vim using the command: vimtutor It should be included by default, Debian has it in vim-runtime package. Once I learn a bit more I'm gonna go find something similar as Emacs Dired and something for better project management controls. It's not really hard to learn honestly, it just takes time.
You should see about getting one of the VIM keyword highlighter packages. Gentoo includes a very nice set of keyword highlighting settings that makes VIM handle PHP/BASH/Python/C++ files very nicely, and I'm sure similar packages are available on other platforms.
I will eventually tweak my vimrc... I have got a couple of questions 1) Do you stick to the convention of h,j,k,l because my fingers hurts and I'm just gonna just arrows... 2) Are you using any introspection plugin for C++ (completition)? There was another question but I forgot... hah! I find the usefulness of vim although it's gonna be quite a ride. My honest take is that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone developing (as in, just drop whatever she/he is using) because VIM takes a sweet too much time and it would hinder productivity. More like "take it slow until you are ready then pimp up your VIM with plugins you need"
I don't normally use a plugin for introspection. Just never got around to it. No, I don't stick to the hjkl convention, because arrow keys make a lot more sense to me, and every VIM I've used so far supports the arrow keys. VIM can be highly productive once you get used to it, but yes, the learning curve is steep.
Well, I'll report back when the time comes. I'm pretty much reading/following the code from Accelerated C++ to get familiar with the language. I'm not an stranger to the syntax but there are certain language specifics I need to learn... I need to change the theme color and get a useful cheatsheet but so far everything is going peachy.
Another useless post, but this time I'm just excited. Full introspection, full code completition (I would love to see it output the documentation though). This pretty much matches everything I loved about PyCharm. Yea I spent a little bit configuring my vim, got tired hanging around the terminal.
