If you're using vim and think you're developing as well and as fast as you can, you're probably wrong.
* 17 years of screen and I've finally switched over to tmux. None of the features were sufficiently compelling for me to change, but it's so much faster
I've been developing software in Vim, Netbeans, and Visual Studio (with about a year or so of Eclipse thrown in for good measure).
I've worked on projects in all three ranging from tiny 1kloc one-offs to several million line systems, using C, C++, Java, Bash, and a smattering of Perl and Python.
For Java and C++ code bases beyond a few thousand lines, I certainly agree that language aware tools are invaluable. It's sad that C++'s nature makes such tools so difficult to build. Going from Netbeans/Java to Netbeans or VS C++ is like going back in time - not quite laser scalpel to flint knife, but sometimes it feels like it!
Fortunately, I spend the bulk of my time in C, where I find myself at least as effective in Vim as in either Netbeans or VS. Granted, I obviously do use a few additional tools - primarily ctags and make.
If vim only had fully language aware navigation and search, I think I'd be just as effective in it as in any IDE. Exuberant ctags comes close, but just isn't quite there, and cscope is just too clumsy and slow.
Though there's something that feels ... wrong with eclim in particular. Not that it'll stop me from using it if it works well!
After spending a little under a year learning vim, I've found that while I make the occasional error in command mode, nothing has helped me "think in code" quite as well.
I'd say most of my time is spent thinking while programming anyway, but when I am typing, nothing has made me faster than vim. "Small" things like "hmm, I don't like what's in this block" can be as slow as reaching over to the mouse and selecting a bunch of code by hand, trying very hard to be precise, or typing "ci{". Which is easier?
Perhaps I've been missing out on all these years on the true power of IDEs and not using them to their full potential, but when it comes to programming, I like to be the one typing, not some fool machine. Do I occasionally make mistakes? Of course. Is my overall output better because I have fewer distractions? Absolutely.
Of course, that's just me. I know plenty of people who are a lot faster with autocomplete and auto-quote closing and everything else.
I used Delphi for years, then Visual Studio for years, then Eclipse for a while, then QtCreator for years. I've haven't found anything in any graphical IDE that can't be succinctly reproduced in a text-only environment like vim.
I can imagine a whole load of awesome features that would require a truly graphical output. They just haven't been written yet.
I might look into tmux, screen is kind of buggy under cygwin.
There are plenty of code-completion plugins, and I used to have tab-completion enabled, but I never got around to adding it on my latest environment and don't miss it.
Of course, cscope is mostly useful for c/c++/java, but I've used the ruby vim map just fine. I operate on a codebase that's probably past a million lines of code. Maybe not all useful lines, I haven't seen them all ;)
I certainly wouldn't say no to a more responsive terminal.
To make the switch-over even easier, rebind to C-a instead of the (sensible) tmux default of C-b. Put this into your ~/.tmux.conf:
set -g prefix C-a unbind C-b bind C-a send-prefix bind-key C-a last-window
Unlearning typing it twice for when you're not in screen is the hard part.