Vim is a text editor, not an IDE. It can be, as you point out, made to act like an IDE with enough plugins - but it is still not an IDE.

Comparing Vim to other text editors (sublime text, etc.) is a much more apt comparison.

Even as a text editor - it doesn't come with things like bookmarks, navigable hyperlinks, syntax highlighting, collapsible sections, etc without plugins.

>bookmarks

    :h mark

>syntax highlighting

    :h syntax

>collapsible sections

    :h folds

You've got me on navigable hyperlinks with a simple setting or key stroke out of the box, but it's trivial to write a binding to open the URI beneath the cursor.

I hear you - but I'd say that next to nobody just uses mark or syntax or folds because they're extremely bare-bones implementations of those features.

Eh, I use all of those extensively...vim ships with syntax highlighting and syntax aware folding for every obscure language I've ever used (well, there was one academic project language that didn't ship those with vim, but guess what, they had those files in their repository).

Marks are powerful and play really well with all the movements like I'd expect them too...

So, you regularly use vim without any plugins then?

Marks doesn't even have a visual indicator. So, somehow I doubt you're just using marks for bookmarking and vanilla syntax highlighting is pretty weak.

Let's see your list of plugins. I bet you have at least 30 of them.

Edit: Forgot to answer the initial question. Yes, I use vim exclusively for anything involving editing/writing. In the past years mostly C, C++, Haskell, LaTeX, Java, python...

Largest codebases I've worked with were upwards of 200k SLOC.

https://github.com/merijn/dotfiles/blob/master/install/vimpl...

I have 12, and most of them only have occasional/no use, but I haven't changed to remove them.

Coquille for working with Coq.

CtrlP for fuzzy opening of files.

Gundo for visually looking through vim's undo tree (I rarely use this, probably like once a month max, but it's very useful when I do need it)

My own haskell indenting plugin which is now disabled, because I'm too lazy to make it work like I need it too.

rainbow_parentheses highlights matching parentheses.

syntastic for highlighting compiler errors/warnings in files I'm editing.

tagbar, to be honest I actually never use this and should remove it.

vim-hdevtools lets me query the type of haskell expressions and show definitions of data types, although I mostly only use the type functionality.

vim-hoogle I never could be bothered to configure it, so it doesn't work and should be removed.

vim-pathogen for loading plugins.

vim-surround new movements for editing surrounding punctuation/html tags.

vimbufsync dependency of Coquille.

So, that's 9 plugins I actually use, one of which being a dependency.

You should definitely start using tagbar more. It really ups the IDE-ification of Vim. Super cool stuff.

The problem is that the main use I thought to have for it is jumping to functions, but I usually do that using / (search) and/or ctags (Ctrl-])

That's an utterly weak argument. I use Vim extensively with and without plugins, and never feel hampered by lack of them.

I strongly disagree. They're all very powerful features that don't require anything to be useful, if not user friendly, out of the box in a reasonable distribution of vim.

Any data to backup your statement ("next to nobody")?

Mostly it depends on where you are coming from. The key is that you'd want to avoid context switches. All my other tools are CLI, so adding an editor in a tmux pane rounds everything out. There is no context switch between my editor and my tools. If all my tools were GUI, It would be a cobbled together set of tools with an editor around it. If you were using an IDE suite and

It just depends where you start and are going.