[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.