I’m a big user of both Vim and Emacs and agree that they offer huge productivity boosts as editors. The speed that modal editing (Vim) gives you or the extensibility of Emacs is unparalleled.
But at the same time I believe it’s naive to underestimate the productivity offered by IDEs such as IntelliJ or Pycharm. While news tools such as LSP are wonderful additions to Vil/Emacs, the experience doesn’t come close to what dedicated IDEs offer.
My personal flow is to use Vim for true editing, which gives me the power of modal editing, and switch to a full IDE when I need to do extensive refactoring or need code insights or need powerful debugging offered by an IDE.
IdeaVim works fine. I can't use vim sandwich and that's about my only complaint.
I was firmly resistant to IDEs like OP and quite in love with neovim for years. Tried PyCharm because of work, never looking back.
I could never find just a simple debugger for vim that was easy and intuitive to set up. Always had trouble.
And now, the in-IDE Jupyter Notebooks that allow me to use vim keybindings (albeit with an annoying bug that at least has a workaround https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/VIM-2504) has completely changed the way I work.
Are there occasionally show stopper bugs? Yes. Is it worth it for amazing debugger integration? Absolutely.
Having once been a heavy user of emacs and then switched to IDEA, I'm not sure emacs actually is more extensible. The IDEA API is enormous and very powerful. Plugins don't seem particularly limited in what they can do.
But at the same time I believe it’s naive to underestimate the productivity offered by IDEs such as IntelliJ or Pycharm. While news tools such as LSP are wonderful additions to Vil/Emacs, the experience doesn’t come close to what dedicated IDEs offer.
My personal flow is to use Vim for true editing, which gives me the power of modal editing, and switch to a full IDE when I need to do extensive refactoring or need code insights or need powerful debugging offered by an IDE.