came across all the features provided in IDEsMaybe merely having a lot of features is not necessarily the most valuable thing when writing software. I suspect most truly great developers (I'm not one of those, but I've worked in the field long enough to know them when I see them work) just want the tools to get the hell out of their way. Stability, speed, predictability, consistency, generality; those are probably the most important features for a great developer. I like those features, too, and it's why I use vim.
Also note that I use vim for everything. I don't have to context switch when I go from Perl, to Python, to C, to bash, to sh, to configuration files, to HTML, to CSS, to JavaScript, to RPM spec files, to deb control/rules files, etc. It's always the same in vim (and vim has syntax highlighting for all of them). This is where generality has value. I don't have to think about how to copy/paste, how to find the end of a block, or how to perform a search/replace across the whole file or just a segment of it. It's always the same.
The greatest Java IDE in the world, whatever that is, is definitely not the right tool for editing files on a remote server. So, I would have to switch mental modes to use it. That would slow me down. I can use vim or emacs for that, no problem.
And, of course, as I mentioned, there is probably no feature in any IDE for which there isn't a parallel in vim or emacs. It is probably optional, it is probably not pretty, and it probably requires you to learn some new key sequences. But, it almost certainly exists, whatever it is. But, after spending a few years with a good editor, you'll probably find that simpler but more general solutions are superior to special purpose tools.
Which was when I became curious as to why I see a lot more chatter about text editors like vim/emacs instead of the other way around.
Age has it privileges. emacs and vi have been around for a long time. Assuming something is good and continues to get better, the longer it exists, the more users it will have. emacs and vi (in the form of vim) are both excellent and continue to get better. Thus they have a very large, very dedicated following. Which leads to faster improvement (though in directions that might not be immediately apparent if big IDE-style feature lists are what you think of as "improvement"), more third party tools and support, and more docs and examples.
You'll never hear any long-time practicioner of software development or systems management say that learning one of the two major editors is a waste of time. Knowing vim or emacs will very likely serve you well for the rest of your career. Knowing an IDE might make working in one language in one environment a little bit more awesome for year or two or three that you work in that language in that environment.