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by Theodores 2465 days ago
Pode Vim, an album by Pedro Kimura is popular in Brazil.

Using git with vim also seems a popular search combo.

Personally I am amazed that the younger generation are keen to learn vim. I don't see why as I have gone the other way to only use phpStorm for editing in earnest. For me using vim for code instead of phpStorm is a bit like handwriting instead of typing, a definite loss of formatting and neatness.

The reason I find modern interest in vim so amusing is that there is no compelling excuse to use it. In the olden days when you had to queue to use a terminal in a computer room to enter code you had handwritten on paper there were no 'nano' or other editors, you had to learn and use vi.

I don't believe vi is quicker than a full size IDE but I still use vi, find and grep because I don't fully trust these new IDE tools and I am fairly dyed in the wool as a command line user.

The tools I don't fully understand are the textmate, sublime, notepad++ and other middling editors that don't offer the brilliance of vim or the possibilities of a phpStorm grade editor.

5 comments

It's available on servers. It's fast to manipulate text with. It doesn't spin up my CPU (cough electron editors). It never falls over on me. Basically it just gets out of my way.
Even if I don't use Vim much anymore, there are things that I would still do it Vim because it just does them faster.
I'm curious, why phpStorm specifically and not IntelliJ or any other jetbrains IDE?

Obviously its php specific features aren't relevant here since we're discussing editors (or development environments) in general.

Personally I find that most IDEs are far too language specific, and I can't possibly invest the time to learn an IDE per language when there's so many languages I regularly need to edit (and probably yet more in the future).

VSCode isn't half bad, as it has plugins for just about everything, but it's still a juggernaut in terms of software size. None of the jetbrains product I've used had decent plugins for all the languages I need.

And of course none of these work over a purely terminal ssh connection, which is a bit of a deal breaker for me.

I believe Sublime does offer the brilliance of vim. And I use vim too! They take about the same time to configure to similar levels of usability. Sometimes a more native UI is preferable. Notepad++ has a bit more built-in. There's some Windows particular stuff where I might want that Win 2000 aesthetic. I'm thankful for all the options.
What features are you using in phpStorm that you think are missing from vim?

Definitely not trying to convince you to use vim over your favourit IDE, I'm just currious what your top 10 missing features are.

but phpstorm is just for php, right? what if you want to code in some rust, does it support it? with just a few tweaks and packages sublime turns into a half-decent editor for any language and stack.