I haven't used Chocolat, but I did use Vim for ~10 years and switched to ST2 some months ago. Still, both ST2 and Chocolat ship with a bunch of commonly used features without having to install and configure N plugins by hand.
Three things:
1. I'm supporting an independent developer. I want to live in a world where someone can make money off of writing great software, especially something I use day in and day out.
2. I amortize the cost ($60 for ST2) across all the time I spend coding. That's a small amount of money in the end, especially if I feel my overall quality of life has improved.
3. The time spent configuring, tweaking, and troubleshooting Vim configs and plugins is time spent not doing work. This made sense to me when I used to value my time at $0. Now that I want to spend less time tweaking and more time working, though, time is all the more precious and it's zero sum.
Now, I am willing to spend some time configuring my tools, but these days I am much more receptive to something that ships with a bevy of useful features where configuration is mostly optional, as opposed to necessary.
Oh, I agree totally on the paying-the-dev front; I'd buy this before boxed software for sure. This looks like a great tool if you don't have the time for vim's learning curve. Pathogen and git submodules take care of the configuration for me in vim, fwiw.
Three things:
1. I'm supporting an independent developer. I want to live in a world where someone can make money off of writing great software, especially something I use day in and day out.
2. I amortize the cost ($60 for ST2) across all the time I spend coding. That's a small amount of money in the end, especially if I feel my overall quality of life has improved.
3. The time spent configuring, tweaking, and troubleshooting Vim configs and plugins is time spent not doing work. This made sense to me when I used to value my time at $0. Now that I want to spend less time tweaking and more time working, though, time is all the more precious and it's zero sum.
Now, I am willing to spend some time configuring my tools, but these days I am much more receptive to something that ships with a bevy of useful features where configuration is mostly optional, as opposed to necessary.
YMMV, etc.