The article mentioned ctags, which actually gets you quite far in this regard. Combined with CtrlP (a vim plugin) and the Silver Searcher, I navigate large codebases quite quickly. I do agree that full blown IDEs probably have better support for refactoring code, but so far the advantages of using vim/tmux/unix commands are much more valuable to me:
- it's more natural for me to have a shell as a starting point and jump into an editor, rather than the other way around; it suits my workflow much better
- I can combine tools in a very convenient way, `:!ls /tmp` real quick from my vim, fuzzy search some json file hidden inside an atrocious directory structure, `:!git status -s` to see what I've changed, and so on
- IDEs are often language specific, which implies learning a new IDE for every language; I only need to know vim, which I use for every language I use but Java
- I'm more of a keyboard person rather than a mouse person, so terminal based tools that have intuitive keyboard bindings suit me better than IDEs which often require you to learn some really awkward key combinations to do things that I do very quickly in vim; just take a look at the cheatsheets for e.g. PyCharm/IntelliJ and you'll see what I mean (yes I know about the vim plugin for IntelliJ, but as an experienced vim user, it's not that great)
"I only need to know vim, which I use for every language I use but Java"
Java does seem to be the big exception in that 1) it's so overly verbose it almost requires an IDE to handle all of the boilerplate, 2) has enough static typing to allow deterministic refactoring, 3) is popular enough to support massive IDE engineering efforts.
I use IntelliJ for Java (and sometimes Scala), and Emacs for pretty much everything else.
I agree with your about language specific IDE's however the exceptions are sometimes very good.
I use intellij, it has intelligent support for Python, JavaScript (including node), SQL, HTML, CSS and PHP all working out the box with very little setup required, its the sheer integration of things.
I'm aware I could get close with emacs (except frankly its web modes suck) but I'd have to find all those bits myself, integrate them and hope that it wasn't fragile (you know updated fizz which was a dependency of too but bar uses a different version) and at the end I'd still have what I would regard as an inferior less cohesive tool.
There are no absolutes in matters of taste and that's what it is I think.
- it's more natural for me to have a shell as a starting point and jump into an editor, rather than the other way around; it suits my workflow much better
- I can combine tools in a very convenient way, `:!ls /tmp` real quick from my vim, fuzzy search some json file hidden inside an atrocious directory structure, `:!git status -s` to see what I've changed, and so on
- IDEs are often language specific, which implies learning a new IDE for every language; I only need to know vim, which I use for every language I use but Java
- I'm more of a keyboard person rather than a mouse person, so terminal based tools that have intuitive keyboard bindings suit me better than IDEs which often require you to learn some really awkward key combinations to do things that I do very quickly in vim; just take a look at the cheatsheets for e.g. PyCharm/IntelliJ and you'll see what I mean (yes I know about the vim plugin for IntelliJ, but as an experienced vim user, it's not that great)