[arcturus17]

I tried getting vim to match my favorite features in VSCode / Jetbrains IDEs and almost went crazy. Rather simple things like code completion or syntax highlighting were already moderately complex to set up. The command palette present in both Jetbrains and VSCode also has thousands of actions easily searchable in plain language, the most simple of which can be replicated with vim (ex: open file) but many of which would likely require some heavy extra configuration. I never even got into replicating things like live templates which are a massive productivity booster for me - I simply gave up.

For me it’s much easier to install the vim plugin in my IDE or editor of choice. I get the modal editing goodness of vim with a supercharged layer of utilities that work out of the box.

[Lio]

I'm not going to argue with your personal choice or that you should spend time configuring vim.

I'll just point out that the things you've discussed are possible in Vim if you want them.

E.g. live-templates (snippets) https://github.com/neoclide/coc-snippets

and that if you don't want to spend the time configuring yourself projects like https://spacevim.org/ exist.

Now there probably are some IDE features that vim can't replicate with plugins but it's very rare to see someone actually provide an example of one.

Something like a profiler with flame graph might be an example. Things like refactoring, completion or fast command search probably aren't.

[arcturus17]

The most important part of my point is not that I believe that they can’t be replicated, it’s that an IDE offers them with a time investment that’s nearly zero (I spend a couple hours per year fiddling with my IDE settings, tops).

I’d add that I am also quite doubtful that although they may be replicated, in many cases there aren’t going to be gotchas and UX problems not present in one of the popular IDEs. I can’t remember the specifics but I know that when I set up code completion in vim it wasn’t nearly as good as the one in my editor.

Never heard of spacevim but I have tried a few other “plug-and-play” vim adjutants like Pathogen and always ended up running into problems and spending more time on the issue than I had signed up for. Might solve some of the problems I mention, but I’m afraid it’s too late for me.

My IDE does everything I need and more, working out of the box on all machines I own (they’re not even that powerful) with fantastic UX and minimal fuss. I’m a Jetbrains guy so it costs me 6€/month but amortized per hour spent it might as well be free. If I wanted to save that nominal cost I’d go with VSCode, which I’ve worked with before and is nearly as good.

I’d turn this around and ask, why would I ever switch to pure vim?

[Lio]

> I’d turn this around and ask, why would I ever switch to pure vim?

I don't think that you should.

I'm only addressing the point that vim can't be used to do IDE like tasks, which with LSP support it clearly can

...but right now you will have to configure it if that's something you want. If it's not then you're good to go with your favourite IDE already.

[The_Colonel]

There are things like refactoring which technically are supported by vim extensions, but are just utterly inferior to the dedicated IDEs.

For example - you know "extract method" refactoring. Pretty basic thing and I assume vim can do that. But on top of that when you extract the method, Intellij will go through rest of your code and try to figure out if some other parts could be automatically refactored to use this new extracted method as well. It will offer to change the method signature if needed to do that as well.

Intellij will - as you type - notify that the code you're writing is structurally duplicating an existing code and offer an intention to automatically refactor the code to remove the duplication.

Intellij offers an integration with databases - in my code I use a lot of SQL queries - intellij can connect to the data source and scan the schema. When you then type queries into strings, Intellij recognizes them as such, offers autocomplete to the tables/column and validates the query for correctness (also allows you to click through to the actual data view). It understands like 20 SQL dialects and things like JPQL as well.

Another example is the deep flow analysis which can point out logical mistakes as you type (things like NPEs). This is very helpful in daily programming, extreme example of that is shown here: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2019/11/intellij-ideas-stati...

Most of the time when people showed me a "vim IDE", it looked like IDE from the 90s - highlight was that it showed you the list of class members, had a snippet manager and could sort of rename a variable. State of the art is much farther since the 90s though ...

[Lio]

That sounds very useful and it's not something that vim gives you out of the box but I'm not sure that anything you're describing is not possible via LSP plugins and extensions.

Running a server to automatically search for duplicate code sounds exactly like the kind of task that LSP can handle.

Since VSCode has tools for deep flow analysis (although I can't say how they compare to Intellij) then I'm pretty sure I can access them from neovim.

Maybe if I was a Java developer something like Intellij would look more attractive but I've never really been impressed with the rest of the JetBrains IDE family.

Horses for courses I guess. If there's some tool you want that's only available in Intellij then that's what you'll use.

[The_Colonel]

All of that is of course theoretically possible with LSP or other vim extensions. It's just that nobody did it.

Another thing is the level of integration. There are many tools which offer static analysis, duplicate detection etc. But it's completely different level of usability when you see this info immediately as you type.

[Lio]

People already use LSP in vim/neovim. Realtime feedback as you type is a thing in vim.

Here is an example for typescript users.

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/modern-typescript-and-react-deve...

Again this does require you to configure things and that may not be what you want to spend your time doing but it's perfectly possible.

Also I'll add that I'm not arguing that vim is better than any other particular IDE or editor, just that IDE like features can easily be added.

[The_Colonel]

Yeah, I know that you can use LSP in vim. But LSP for most languages is a far cry from what you can get in "real" IDEs.

It's always "LSP could be just as good" or "support for that can be easily added" - but it's just not happening - nobody does the work to make that just as good.