I’m relatively new to programming, I’ve been learning C on linux using nano and it’s been very fun. I’ve recently fallen into the emacs/vim rabbithole and I’ve been watching videos about emacs, Doom, spacemacs, neovim and reading comments about people switching from this or that to another config or editor, and I’ve been a bit lost on what to do. Then I realised that I haven’t done any coding and spent all of my time focusing on editors. So here is my question (which has probably been asked many times) : what is the point of investing so much time learning all of this when there are some IDEs that are preconfigured with all the functionality a programmer would need ? Does learning neovim or emacs actually save time in the long run? I know that they’re much more lightweight than IDEs and I’ve been really enjoying using the terminal much more than my time on IntelliJ, but having an easy out of the box visual debugger, refactoring and jump into functions can be really helpful in the long run I think, especially when starting to write actual large programs. Nano is fun, but not a time saver. Why did you chose your editor?
To answer your question directly, there are some presets available on the internet that show how to set up Vim (Emacs too, I guess, but I only have experience with Vim) for development in a specific language. Those presets allow for a pretty fast set up and you only need to learn basics then.
Still, compared to UI-based IDE, I’d say that those are handier. After all, most of the time you spend is usually spent on thinking, not traversing the code or typing one. So whatever advantages you will get from navigating Vim quicker they can’t be a major difference in dev speed.
TLDR; choose what feels better, there are plugins for lots of things in console and vice versa, but don’t invest too heavily in an instrument you don’t like after several tries.