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by agounaris 3429 days ago
Seriously people this is 2017! We have the technology. Learn vi in order to have the same editing experience everywhere but honestly when it comes to IDEs, there are just really good software packages out there with 0 configuration hassle.
1 comments

You imply that vim is somehow technological inferior to some other tool. I take issue with that. I don't use vim because I have to or some silly 'vim everywhere' argument. I use it because it is a demonstrably superior text editing appliance.

Every so often when vim irritates me I try out PyCharm or vm-whatsit, and while IDE's do have better viz for some use cases, the actual act of manipulating code in-buffer never comes close to speaking vim. And I always add the vim plugin, without them the tool would be of no use to me whatsoever.

I hope someday some tool will eclipse (no) vim, but that's simply not the case in 2017.

I'm in the same boat. Local development only, my terminal is still my IDE. Other editing tools I've attempted and jumped back out of:

PyCharm - No good vim emulation for editing

Spacemacs - Soft locks, Ctrl-] doesn't follow the same word boundaries as Meta-. (which matches Vim's implementation)

Sublime Text - Closest fit (enough that I own a personal license), but again, the vim emulation is pretty bad.

Atom - Slow. Even at its fastest, it's noticeably slower than Vim

VSCode - Slow (though faster than Atom), no good vim emulation.

Yes, most of my criticisms form around the lack of good vim emulation - my muscle memory is very well established. I've just yet to find a good, responsive, and comfortable editing scheme from a non-Vim editor.

I'm trying Neovim and it's the only editor I've ever tried that I like as much as Vim. Every other substitute has been inadequate.
Agreed, mostly. Also I love your pun.

I recently switched back to doing Java almost 100% of the time and have been using IntelliJ. There are definitely a lot of Java-specific features I use very heavily that I wouldn't be able to get without a lot of of time and plugins in Vim. But sometimes I hit weird bugs that highlight the relative complexity of the core, and I often feel frustrated by how light-weight it isn't (granted, I've tried some other Java IDEs and it's amazing by comparison).

But I used to work more with various scripting languages, and my gvim setup just couldn't be beat. So light-weight, but easy to set up again if I needed to. Still able to navigate code structures, debug without context switching. I often did something with a partner that amazed them, because they couldn't do it with their IDE; my favorite thing in the world is the look on someone's face when I select a rectangular section of text and change the indentation without affecting the stuff on the left. It was incredibly productive for years. I still occasionally go back there when I'm working in a single Java file, because the vi emulation mode in IntelliJ isn't quite there and I can manipulate the raw text so much faster in gvim.