Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

Two questions:

With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have?

Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

Vim, the text editor, might be relevant if you want a powerful text editor that's installed on basically any *nix system ever. Nano has become nearly as ubiquitous so it's unlikely that you'll need to know vi/m on most hosts these days.

Vim, the editing paradigm, is a relevant skill if you value trading time to learn a way of editing text that is vastly different from traditional. It's a faster way of editing that once you grok it will probably make you annoyed about editing text in editors that don't support it. VS Code has a pretty good vim implementation, though. I personally think it was worthwhile, but people value different things. You might not like the investment of time it takes to become proficient or may not find it as useful as I have.

I can't speak to what is the state of the art for Lisp development. I'm confident that you can use editors other than Emacs or Vim for it, though.

TLDR; Slimv and Vlime support SLIME like development environment for Lisp in Vim. They have similar features but their implementation details and key-bindings are different. The OP prefers Slimv more than Vlime.

But I think the OP needs to add a disclosure that they are also contributor to Slimv - https://github.com/kovisoft/slimv/commits?author=susam.

Open source contributions are good. This is a good thing. But this needs disclosure because they could be biased towards this plugin consciously or subconsciously.

I don't know about VSC but most IDEs are rather difficult to extend. VIM makes it quite easy to create a plugin or prototype new ideas. If you don't need clever code completion etc., VIM is still very useful. Other than emacs, VIM also has some guidelines wrt to code organisation (pack, plugin, autoload, ftplugin, syntax etc.) that make things easier. vimscript is a simple language that has its warts but actually is quite useful in the context of this editor. To some extent, you can write (parts of) your plugins also in python, ruby, lua, mzscheme etc.

So, to some extent it's still useful and relevant. VIM also runs on your android phone, VSC, Idea, Eclipse etc. don't.

WRT to learning lisp, I'd recommend racket. It's scheme and unfortunately mzscheme lacks the libraries, e.g., common lisp has. It's very useful nevertheless.

I think you should use the environment that makes you the most productive (and happiest).

For me that is vim.

But I also have the questionable (and questioned) opinion that, for that matter, you can write a state of the art program in Fortran. If you happen to find a O(n) algorithm for prime factorisation, and you write it in Fortran, would it not be state of the art?