I feel like the post is poorly written. I believe the article is clearly written by someone who has never extensively used an editor {vim, emacs}. Although I do agree that the clean vim/emacs will only have very limited capabilities, it is so obvious that people that do use vim/emacs for development work do customize their setups via their custom/personal dotfiles.
Agree. Due to the highly extensible nature many editors or IDEs have, pretty much any back and forth on this issue is largely moot and boils down to a religious war.
This should not be on the front page of hackernews.