Vim has never crashed for me. And I've been using it almost exclusively for almost ten years.

I don't use any plugins though. I haven't found a single usable plugin. They are terrible hacks. I figure vim must have an API that's difficult to integrate (it's too general a text editor. Look at the amount of built-in settings that hardly play nice with each other).

I agree. Vim is solid as a rock. I've been using it for about 10 years and I saw it crash 2 times. On the other hand, I had to use Atom for 2 weeks and it crashed on me exactly 6 times.

Have you tried upgrading to a non-ancient vim?

It's 6 months old at most. Their distro probably doesn't even have vim 8 yet, ubuntu 16.10 doesn't.

Or, to neovim.

Actually, neovim is somewhat more prone to crashing than traditional vim, in my experience

Either you have a plugin that's wreaking havoc, or you have something weird in your setup, because a stable Vim version crashing is not something I've seen often.

I had this problem about a month ago until I upgraded to Vim 8 - not had a segfault since.

It's also worth spring-cleaning your config/plugin setups.