I've tried and learned vim and I'm very capable of navigating with it (I don't use marks but I use about everything else) and it is precisely good at one thing: being an editor. If you try to make it an IDE, I believe you're just using a bad IDE. It is only effective for me as a very lightweight editor for quickly making simple edits to a file.

Why don't I like it as an IDE?

* Second hand auto complete

* Second hand project management

* No debugger

These are actually to me huge features and the third party support for each of them exists but doesn't touch the quality of implementation in a dedicated IDE. Not to mention it adds hours of extra work to getting started in an environment you don't already have configured.

And frankly, you don't have to learn vim to recognize this.