I have used Emacs, Vim, CLI, and IDEA is much superior for code navigation. I still use Vim for text editing. It's a great text editor, but IDEA has semantic parsing, code generation, and refactoring capabilities that go far beyond what Vim or any other text editor will ever support. Do you not realize that IDEA has its own search and navigation features outside of the Vim plugin? Emacs can come close if you spend years writing customizations, and even then it will feel like a clumsy pile of hacks versus a modern, well designed professional tool, that just works flawlessly with 5 minutes of setup. Actually, writing plugins in IDEA can do things that Emacs could only dream of. Emacs Lisp is powerful, but JVM languages are arguably more powerful.