I love vim and I've used it for many years, but for programming I've found the "code understanding" features of an IDE to be as valuable as the dexterity that vim allows in terms of input and navigation. I do not simply mean syntax checking--a baseline in my opinion, but more of things like inheritance hierarchy navigation, refactoring of code (e.g. renaming all instances of a particular local variable, a particular function, etc etc, without the risk of a simple text substitution), mark occurrences (showing all of the reads and/or writes of a particular the variable under the cursor in all views), and so on. It is even better if your IDE can run parts of the compiler on the fly (an instructor once told me that eclipse does this with java. However, I'm not sure if it's feasible for something like C++ due to the complexity of the language). And then you have all of the other features of the IDE at your fingertips too (e.g. an integrated debugger or profiler).
A few years ago I searched high and low for something satisfactory that combines the text editing/navigation of vim with the extremely useful features of an IDE. The closest thing I could find for C++ was Netbeans combined with the jVi plugin. The VIM functionality provided by such a setup is not too barebones, and the IDE fills in the gaps where other VIM plugins may have been used. There may be something better now, but I've grown accustomed to this setup and it takes a substantial amount of time and effort to reroll.
There is also Eclipse CDT and the "eclim" plugin for it (which actually uses an existing vim process. Since this means that all of the other vim functionality and vim plugins work in tandem with the IDE, this is the ideal setup), but I recall that there was much lacking with both Eclipse CDT and "eclim" itself (I do not recall exactly what, but, again, this was a few years ago). Things may be different now and I encourage anyone looking for something similar to take a peek at both Netbeans with the jVi plugin and Eclipse CDT with the eclim plugin.
A few years ago I searched high and low for something satisfactory that combines the text editing/navigation of vim with the extremely useful features of an IDE. The closest thing I could find for C++ was Netbeans combined with the jVi plugin. The VIM functionality provided by such a setup is not too barebones, and the IDE fills in the gaps where other VIM plugins may have been used. There may be something better now, but I've grown accustomed to this setup and it takes a substantial amount of time and effort to reroll.
There is also Eclipse CDT and the "eclim" plugin for it (which actually uses an existing vim process. Since this means that all of the other vim functionality and vim plugins work in tandem with the IDE, this is the ideal setup), but I recall that there was much lacking with both Eclipse CDT and "eclim" itself (I do not recall exactly what, but, again, this was a few years ago). Things may be different now and I encourage anyone looking for something similar to take a peek at both Netbeans with the jVi plugin and Eclipse CDT with the eclim plugin.