Visual Studio is a great IDE for writing .NET code and is very good at C and C++ on Windows. When I started with PHP on Linux after 7 years of C++ and C# in VS, I quickly realized there was nothing comparable to VS and decided to scale the Vim learning cliff.
I've found Vim's text editing to be better than VS. For example, it's extremely to change a string - ci" - where in VS it's ctrl-leftarrow a few times then ctrl-shift-rightarrow a few times. In Vim it's much harder to compile things, no Intellisense, no refactoring, no decent equivalent to the Solution Explorer, and tons of other missing things. There's no doubt about it. A lot of these things are less useful when working in PHP, so Vim makes sense there.
Not believing the Vim hype is like wondering how anybody could be a Dallas Cowboys fan, which makes a lot of sense to people who grew up or live in Dallas. To people writing code where VS isn't available, there's more focus on editing letters which Vim lets you do more efficiently.
I've found Vim's text editing to be better than VS. For example, it's extremely to change a string - ci" - where in VS it's ctrl-leftarrow a few times then ctrl-shift-rightarrow a few times. In Vim it's much harder to compile things, no Intellisense, no refactoring, no decent equivalent to the Solution Explorer, and tons of other missing things. There's no doubt about it. A lot of these things are less useful when working in PHP, so Vim makes sense there.
Not believing the Vim hype is like wondering how anybody could be a Dallas Cowboys fan, which makes a lot of sense to people who grew up or live in Dallas. To people writing code where VS isn't available, there's more focus on editing letters which Vim lets you do more efficiently.