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by nerdponx 3133 days ago
I came to the same realization about Vim about a year ago. I've used Sublime and Vim/Nvim extensively, and I've spent at least a few hours in Textmate, Emacs, Spacemacs, Notepad++, VS Code, and Atom as well.

All of those text editors above have some excellent and unique redeeming qualities. But at the end of the day their actual language support tends to be weak.

Now I do Python work in Pycharm, R work in Rstudio, and SQL work in whatever IDE goes with my database engine. I use Nvim as my system $EDITOR but at work I'm using it less and less often. I love it and I'll never give it up, but it's becoming more of a hobby tool than something that helps me get things done.

3 comments

I'm hopeful that https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol will decouple some of these concerns. We've built support for it for our DSL, and it's pretty great so far (esp in VSCode). Emacs LSP support is still pretty slow, so I don't use it when in emacs at present, but it feels like the right direction for getting good language support into editors.
LSP seriously gives me hope for the future. It is an awesome project, and I'm looking forward to seeing more widespread editor support for it.

It's still fairly new so most solutions I've seen that use it still have some sharp edges.

PyCharm is excellent.

I've gone pretty deep into both vim and emacs over the years, and so it always hurts a little when something like PyCharm comes along, and it works better, and does more out of the box than any finely tuned emacs/vim setup (which often take significant time investments).

You should really give the IdeaVIM plugin a try. I use it in several Intellij editors, PyCharm included, and it is terrific. It has a few quirks and discrepencies from VIM, but it is a far better text editor than the editor that comes stock in any other IDE.
I'm grudgingly coming along.

I use vim for everything, but Intellij (because we have the licenses; I mainly use it for Python at the moment) has my attention. Wish I had more time to learn it; it has been a couple of months and I still don't feel really comfortable. But the capabilities actually make a difference.

Vim is never going away for me; muscle memory, if nothing else, ensures it will always be the most efficient way for me to type text and I spend most of my time in the terminal anyway. And as nice as it was when it was my go-to for everything, there are times when a special purpose editor has a place.