MDmdaniel·Jan 5, 2018
embed vim as their text editor
Part of that problem is that a really good IDE isn't editing text: it's editing code. One may retort "but code is stored in text files," and yes, that happens to be the primary serialization format but while it's in RAM the editor is making changes to the AST (for example)[1] and the MPS project[2] even strives to do away with "text file" façade entirely, allowing you to edit the parts that are truly editable, and just graphically render the syntatic sugar for everything else.
That distinction is relevant to the question because merely embedding vim would be problematic since the common language spoken between the IDE's mental model and vim's mental model is text, but I couldn't imagine the pain that would be involved in trying to send down the keystrokes required to update all occurrences of a variable, for
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example.
IntelliJ does have emacs bindings, and does have a vim plugin, but I've watched people use both of them and they suffer from the uncanny valley effect. Not to mention the fact that, and I can't stress this enough, entering character level keyboard shortcuts to change an AST is optimizing the wrong problem.
that can do something like that is emacs
I've actually spent many, many hours thinking about that very issue, and I am 100% convinced in my soul that a sufficiently determined person could in fact make Emacs as smart as IntelliJ. But the problem isn't making it that smart, it's keeping it up to date with the new bugfixes and rules. It might be possible (heh, or even preferable!) to write the AST manipulation and inspection rules using (e)lisp, but given how many developers know Java versus how many know lisps, I doubt a commercial company would bet the farm on such a thing.
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1 = https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/17...
2 = https://github.com/JetBrains/MPS/tree/2017.3.2#jetbrains-mps