I made persistent_undo as part of Google Summer of Code in 2011. Very grateful I got to do that (and for the mentorship of Bram Moolenaar), and I'm so glad that this became part of your essential workflow. I also can't live without it at this point.

I switched from vim (with YouCompleteMe) to VSCode about 4 years ago and I've recently discovered the intellisense engine for VSCode is now available as a vim plugin: https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim.

I've been using vim for 20+ years and have never been into extensive customizations. That was part of the attraction, because I had to deal with a lot of remote servers, often off-shore. With out-of-the box vi/vim I could get the most done with the least number of keystrokes. Someone made a comment above about IDE editors with vim emulation. Wish every IDE would do that. RStudio for example is not exactly vim, but I find it close enough. If only Spyder and Jupyter would that.

To add to this, vim quickfix-reflector ( https://github.com/stefandtw/quickfix-reflector.vim) was life-changing for me.

It lets you modify and save code from the quickfix buffer, so when you search for something and it shows up in the qf, you can do a find replace / edit / etc. This is especially great for mass refactoring / renaming.

By "undodir" are you referring to the "vim-undodir-tree" plugin? Because the "persistent_undo" feature that is built into Vim/Neovim (normally) is what I think of when I hear "undodir".

New(ISH) vim user here. I couldn't figure out how to install YouCompleteMe the other day, but I had not trouble with coc.