Because writing complex JVM applications without an IDE is painful. That doesn't mean IDEs provide a great experience.
I mostly started with Java in various IDEs. Now I'm using Vim whenever I can, as it's pretty much the only powerful editor that doesn't work against me. IntelliJ is incredibly annoying, e.g. auto-formatting the line I'm still typing, turning my inputs into undefined behaviour. Or telling me a file contains an error but not showing an indicator in which line (of >1000) that error is. But I sure am glad it displays 50 markers on the sidebar to tell me the location of every word in a comment the spellchecker didn't recognise. And to top it all off it switches tabs in some random order instead of the order that's literally displayed on the screen (I don't know why this trend is a thing, I'm not too dumb to rearrange my tabs, thank you very much).
No, Vim isn't perfect. But it's snappy, reliable and most importantly doesn't try to "help" me without asking.
I mostly started with Java in various IDEs. Now I'm using Vim whenever I can, as it's pretty much the only powerful editor that doesn't work against me. IntelliJ is incredibly annoying, e.g. auto-formatting the line I'm still typing, turning my inputs into undefined behaviour. Or telling me a file contains an error but not showing an indicator in which line (of >1000) that error is. But I sure am glad it displays 50 markers on the sidebar to tell me the location of every word in a comment the spellchecker didn't recognise. And to top it all off it switches tabs in some random order instead of the order that's literally displayed on the screen (I don't know why this trend is a thing, I'm not too dumb to rearrange my tabs, thank you very much).
No, Vim isn't perfect. But it's snappy, reliable and most importantly doesn't try to "help" me without asking.