[ilovecaching]

Reminder that neovim is completely free, you can modify the editor using Lua, it has a renaissance of new awesome plugins, LSP support for the official Rust LSP server, and as a system developer you can run it on a target device or quickly switch between a serial console and your editor using tmux. Plus, you can easily add new LLM integrations or wrap tools in about a half an hour of hacking. My neovim setup is easily 10x more productive than RustRover.

[mekster]

My NeoVim broke so often I came to realize a product that has 50 random people working on the core and various plugins is not going to make a stable product that would work for years.

After all, there is no consistent testing as a whole product but it's a combination of "works for me" and after some months of originally setting the editor up, things start to break apart saying something is deprecated, something is incompatible with something else and it will start asking for newer NeoVim version which the distro obviously can't keep up with. It's like you're using a nightly build of a product or worse if things can't be fixed.

Maybe someone could snapshot a stable state of NeoVim + some popular plugins and release as some sort of LTS and things might change but currently you'll need to spend time fixing frequently than use it for what you need it for.

[skydhash]

Are you using a neovim distro? I think the broken things only applies for automated setups. I use Vim instead of neovim, but my plugins set is pretty minimal. Most of my config is Vim-related, then a couple of options for the plugins. I instead use the terminal for most stuff.

> Maybe someone could snapshot a stable state of NeoVim + some popular plugins and release as some sort of LTS

Vim Plug (and maybe other plugins managers) can handle tags, branches, and commits references for versioning.

[leoh]

It’s all fucked ime even with nixos from the pov of “just working.” Yes, it’s fun and cool and impressive if you get things all setup and dialed in. But if you care about just dropping in and not spending tons of time configuring your tools, imo JetBrains is just the way to go.

[skydhash]

As a pragmatic programmer, one of the rules is Know thy tools. You don't really drop in. You learn the tools, and adapt them. The first commit of my dotfiles is more than 3 years ago. And I think the actual files are older. And that was me starting from scratch after years of Linux.

Even with JetBrains IDEs, I usually spend an hour configuring stuff (never bothered to save the config, as I seldom use them). I tune my setup as I go. If I'm spending hours everyday with a software, I want it suited to my workflows.

[pquki4]

> Even with JetBrains IDEs, I usually spend an hour configuring stuff

That's you, not most people. Tons of people use VSCode every day for years and their user-level config is not more than a few lines.

You can say what you did helped you personally and you found it worthwhile, but that is no indication of how that would apply to others.

[leoh]

> As a pragmatic programmer, one of the rules is Know thy tools.

Dunno what you’re trying to say with respect to the broader conversation (though I don’t take issue with any of your points, really).

When I say IntelliJ “just works” I hope it’s obvious I’m not just using it as a text editor ;). On the contrary, it is an incredibly powerful tool (I just remembered I forgot to mention shelving — yet another wonderful feature).

Because I’ve spent countless hours with it, I mean it “just works” for doing incredibly sophisticated things that VSCode and nvim hardly approach (let alone with consistency between languages supported by Jetbrains) without an insane amount of time configuring ime.

Yea, you can get good at the configuring, say, with nvim; and it can be fascinating. I am a tools guy. But again, if I want to create X today, futzing with getting the perfect bespoke nvim environment is simply not to my taste.

My point isn’t that my taste is “better”, but more an attempt to say “just use nvim” is not preferable for many folks in many situations.

[skydhash]

I agree with you. I’m not a purist pushing “Unix as a IDE”. I reach to Intellij, Android Studio, and Xcode when the needs arise. I’m saying that a lot of people got confused and try to replicate vs code in neovim, lending to a fragile setup. The correct approach is ground up, maybe taking inspiration from others configs. But everything in your config should be understood.

The same applies to all the tools you use, may it be Intellij, or your shell.

[mekster]

People can spend hours to initially set their environment up but the original post was about having it broken after a period of usage which involves spending unnecessary amount of time fixing than do what they want to do.

[skydhash]

And that's a solved problem. First by not having a fragile setup, then doing backups to have some kind of rollback solutions. An IDE strong point is their cohesion and product support. But it's not magic and things can go haywire. It's like people coding with C or using Arch Linux vs using Java or Debian. The latter are stabler, but they're not silver bullets.

[jkrubin]

True, but I don’t have the time or energy anymore to spend time configuring it. Jetbrains vim plugin is largely pretty good.

[pquki4]

Need evidence of that 10x number.

The bottleneck in programming is often how fast you can think, not how fast you can type or use auto completion, and definitely not some shortcuts. They cut down time but are not magic. Not to mention that different IDEs often have the same features, you just need to find them.

[leoh]

Folks shilling for the nvim cult completely baffle me. YES it’s cool and impressive, but it also means essentially spending hours and hours of time managing your configuration if you want anything remotely close ime to RustRover or any other JetBrains product.

Spending that time can be interesting, but personally, frankly, I’d rather be writing code than fucking around with lua wrappers for vimscript.

Let’s be honest about this stuff and stop putting down an incredible firm that makes incredible tools.

[pjmlp]

As someone old enough to remember when VI was occasionally all caps, XEmacs was cool, no thanks.

[__MatrixMan__]

10x is quite a claim.

Anyhow helix is nice for most of the reasons that neovim is, and also because you spend more time coding and less time fiddling with your setup.

[eviks]

"Most" by range, not by value, since plugins is the biggest reason, and they don't exist in helix

[__MatrixMan__]

Well yes, but that's the point.

I think it's analogous to zsh/fish, either you think that customizing is fun and you want to spend time doing it, or you want a nice set of features enabled by default and a minimal config footprint. Can't have both.

[eviks]

You can have both, it's called "good defaults", then you don't need to customize anything if you don't like customizing. But you can.

Also, helix doesn't have minimal config, it has dozens of various options even before potentially hundreds of keybindings, so you can get buried there "for fun" just like in vim

[sureglymop]

Do you have a link to your config?

[gertop]

Reminder that RustRover is also free (for non commercial use) and doesn't require the user to read adv entire manual before they can use it.

[leoh]

This. But also just pay for your tools if you can. It’s the kind/empathetic thing to do, honors the hard work of others, and helps elevate the craft.

[kaba0]

Anyone claiming bullshit like 10x difference has absolutely no basis in reality. Hell, there wouldn’t be an order of magnitude difference between your best setup vs literally touch typing on a foreign keyboard layout.

Also, neovim is just a text/code editor, not an IDE even with plugins.