[vyskocilm]

I personally prefer https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale plugin. It is in vimscript and supports almost everything (including clangd) out there: https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/blob/master/supported-...

[gen220]

Is there some feature that coc.vim has that ale does not? Can someone explain coc.vim's popularity to me?

I don't understand why coc.vim is so popular, when Ale is so performant and "debuggable" (i.e. produces useful performance traces).

[long-time ale user here, I don't use clangd but I do use python-language-server, which is similar]

[jswny]

Generally it's because Coc has completion, snippets, and pretty much everything from the regular VSCode version of the extension built-in, so Coc can replace multiple plugins, and it works very well.

[gen220]

Right, but Ale does this too (replace multiple plugins, supports completion, linting/formatting).

Is it that coc.vim doesn't make you install the binaries of the tools (i.e. go-pls, python-language-server, clangd)? If so, that would be enough to explain the popularity to me.

IMO, one could make the argument that it's somewhat antithetical to vim-culture, to not understand the non-vim binaries your editor is executing.

[nikki93]

One thing I really like in coc is I can ask to describe a symbol and it'll tell me about it in a hover thing: https://i.imgur.com/NrH0Wwz.png

Do agree that coc is probably the least 'vim-culture'-ey part of such a setup, but hey it does good things. :) I don't think you need to justify using Ale so hard and put coc down, could just use whichever you prefer personally.

[gen220]

Sorry if I came across that way. Agree people should use the things they prefer. :)

I'm trying to see if I'm missing something big/obvious, since coc.vim has been so popular recently.

[nikki93]

No worries! And yeah I went through a phase a few months ago of trying out the completion packages again, it's worth just trying and seeing if you like it. Here's the relevant bits of my config if that helps: https://gist.github.com/nikki93/6ea403d3e2cbff2b3d32d4528edf...

coc.nvim has pretty much worked pretty well out of the box for many languages, and it works for me on macOS, Linux and Windows.

[colordrops]

Do you understand how Ale works?

I use Vim not for philosophical or cultural reasons but because I enjoy the UX.

CoC's autocompletion is much more advanced than Ale. I used Ale for years.

[gen220]

> CoC's autocompletion is much more advanced than Ale

I thought that both are pass-throughs to other completion engines, so isn't this a moot comparison? (maybe coc integrates the completion engine, but it doesn't implement a new one, right?).

I use deoplete, but I'm not married to it (it's kind of slow when you have a big file).

    let g:deoplete#enable_at_startup = 1
    call deoplete#custom#option({
        \'auto_complete_delay': 1000,
        \'sources': {
        \  '_': ['ale', 'buffer'],
        \  'py': ['ale'],
        \}
    \})

If so, isn't the completion experience is strictly a function of the completion engine you're passing coc/ale into (ux), and the binaries that you're passing into coc/ale (completion options)?

[colordrops]

CoC is built around the Microsoft Language Server. I wasn't able to get LSP working with Ale but perhaps things have changed since I switched.

[f00zz]

I've been using syntastic [1] for this. No server needed.

[1] https://github.com/vim-syntastic/syntastic

[tylerscott]

+1 for Ale. It has simplified my Vim life.

[glennvtx]

Same here