I challenge anyone to find me a feature in an editor that you can't find in an IntelliJ IDEA based editor like WebStorm or RubyMine. Atom, Sublime Text, Text Mate, and even Vim and Emacs use (broken) regular expressions to do syntax highlighting and intelligent things. IntelliJ build a "PsyElement" tree which is basically an AST. As such it will always have more features and be more powerful, and it's all on the JVM and super amazingly fast, well except for the indexing and startup (yech), but Cmd+B on any variable in any language IntelliJ understands, or Alt+F7 on a variable definition or Shift+F7 or Shift+F6 for a rename. IntelliJ is actually here from the future to write our code for us, and I'm saying this as a pretty dedicated vim user.
Speed? Resource consciousness? Ability to work on older hardware? Ability to work in a terminal?
Nock Vim's hacky syntax highlighting all you want, but people have done amazing things with it. I mean, just today I found a plugin that properly highlights PHP annotations. All the intelligence in PHPStorm failed to deliver on that front.
Aside from startup speed Intellij is pretty fast, I would like to know what speed issues you might be talking about? This isn't a buggy piece of mess like eclipse.
> Resource consciousness? Ability to work on older hardware? Ability to work in a terminal?
You're right, vim has Intellij beat on all these things. But let's be real here, what platform are you doing heavy duty development on? I'm going to guess it's not a resource constrained, esoteric piece of hardware that only has terminal access. Don't get me wrong, I think you should be proficient with a terminal based text editor to be able to do in place edits over ssh, but seriously, that's not where you're doing most of your development work. At least I hope not.
This is also from a huge vim fan, I love it and I've used it for primary development when suitable IDE environments didn't exist (in the past Scala, recently hacking around with clojure and playing with Rust). But when you've got a mature IDE environment that isn't buggy, fast, and not resource intensive enough to make a big different on your development environment, it's a no brainer in my book. Plus the VIM plugin for Intellij is pretty good ;-)
I've only used Intellij for scala and while the static analysis was pretty useful I wasn't at all impressed by the facilities for live interaction. Maybe some of that is down to the scala repl being pretty poor - perhaps if I used Intellij with python or javascript I would find it more useful.
I don't seem to be able to do multiple cursors in IntelliJ. That's a massively useful feature available in Sublime, Text Mate, VIM (via plugins), and Emacs (via plugins). Emacs can do almost anything. I can read my email, browse the web (with images, no less), chat via IRC and Jabber, open multiple terminals, manage my Git repositories, etc. I can't find anything like that in IntelliJ.
You probably would use IntelliJ's refactoring instead of multiple cursors. Renaming variables, functions, editing function signatures, etc. Whatever you'd do with multiple cursors you would probably do with a refactor, or a search and replace. There's also column select mode.
I use multiple cursors for tons of stuff that can't be handled by search/replace, column selection, or refactoring tools. Once you really get into it, multiple cursors are a very powerful tool.
IDEA's scala support still flags bogus errors (e.g. it doesn't seem to infer the type of a Kleisli { ... } correctly). It's one of the things keeping me on Eclipse.
Its scala refactoring is quite limited (even organize imports doesn't work, can't move a type out of a file without moving it to a different package which will sometimes fail anyway, no "generate interface implementations" or "move method to parent class"), autocomplete is painfully slow, and every so often the UI freezes for several seconds.
