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I can't really agree that VS Code or Helix are "great out of the box". I haven't tried zed. VS Code feels really awful to me (note: this is probably just me) without weeks spent re-configuring it. Even then, it's _way_ too heavy for my laptop to run reliably. Maybe my brain just works differently, but I feel like VSCode fights against me at every turn. Helix is nifty, but also feels like it gets in my way more than it helps. I've never understood the advantage of "rich development environments". The refactoring tools and other fancy aids seem to never work. I wind up using regexes + manual intervention anyway. Also, I don't want to use git through a gui. Leave me be in the terminal where I have everything I need at my fingertips as fast as I can think. Syntax highlighting, linting, completion, and docs are all nice, but I have that in vim. I can run vim in the dev instance I'm ssh-ed into (which is 99.99% of how I work, anyway -- my work laptop is ancient and they won't replace it). I just can't see what those tools add, even for very large codebases. My configuration for vim began in the 90's. I've never put that much work into it at any one time, though it has grown quite complex over time. There are a bunch of plugins I use manged in the config file. 90% of the functionality I need works without those plugins, but even when I need to install them from scratch it's easy to go from "scp config file over" to "full setup" with one command. So in summary, I use vim because it's part of a larger set of standard unix-y tools that are heavily ingrained into muscle memory. The biggest advantage of vim in many ways is that it's a relatively rich environment (e.g. linting, syntax highlighting, doc hints, etc) that I can ctrl-Z to immediately be back in the terminal with. Other than that, it gets out of my way, and I don't think about the editor at all, I think about what I'm doing (decades of muscle memory helps a lot, though -- I'm incapable of not using vim keybindings to edit code, I think). I should move over to neovim, but mostly haven't yet. That's more due to a couple of weird plugins than anything else, though. |
People talk about vim nit being an IDE, but I think a lot of people think of the unix command line as their IDE.