> So first I have to create a problem for myself by using a "modern" editor, and then instead of fixing the problem in the obvious way (going back to the normal editor that works efficiently)
I've been working on LA*P based systems for almost 20 years. Been the head cheerleader of the Unix is the IDE camp and thought I'd never need any editor other than vim. Up until about 6 months ago.
The sad truth is because of the way modern software is engineered and this even includes web sites written in PHP (try magento 2) some modern code bases are really difficult to traverse without a decent IDE and a couple of plugins specific to the stack. Other kinds of development (android, iOS) there are IDEs (principally text editors with a few developer centric features) that add so much convenience it would be pretty dumb to sit there suffering away on the command line and vi for three weeks to accomplish poorly what I could do a lot better in a day with xcode.
Sure its doable by a talented developer but we're talking about an order of magnitude loss of efficiency and I question the brilliance of any developer who makes that call based on their religious notions about text editors.
The point is without an i7 and about 16 gigs of ram most modern IDEs are close to unusable so yeah a light, extensible text editor with some modern features is something a lot of serious software developers get pretty wet about
While I'm sympathetic to arguments that these software projects are poorly architected in violation of UNIX principles right now that doesn't pay the bills.
> I.e. it's not obvious from the unchangingly crappy browser experience itself
Unfortunately web developers's unceasing efforts to slow the web down (with massive frameworks that require custom built software and special IDEs to make and in turn leverage dozens of other such frameworks) outpace browser developers' efforts to speed it up ;)
Of course there are browsers which refuse to support all teh silliness that makes the web slow. They're not very popular though.