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by jauntywundrkind 481 days ago
I committed to vim sometime in the 90's, and have coded on it full-time since. But I've had very poor tooling integration, until a year or two ago.

It's taken some time to grow into it, but I'm definitely enjoying having diagnostics built-in and having types helping me do autocomplete. Step-by-step debugging is fine, if not great.

One of the things that I'll credit as having made a huge different is switching to AstroVim ~2 years ago. It provided a bunch of helpful, sensible leader key bindings, and a little mini dynamic TUI at the bottom of the screen to show them off. AstroVim also has an excellent community repository of ready-to-go preconfigured plugins. I'd been loath to get deep into configuring my own vim, felt overwhelmed by setting up LSP, but having these community packs ready to go has really opened up a broad interest in exploring, in seeing whats out there. Whatever language you work in, there's probably a pretty good ready-to-go setup to get good LSP support! https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity/tree/main/lua/as...

I'd done some years with Eclipse & Eclim, doing Java, long long ago. And knew there were some really important, key dev tools I was missing. Just having separate debugging programs going (or falling back to printf-style debugging), versus that being something I could do in vim was a huge sign to me that while I could edit reasonably well, I was behind the power curve of where I wanted to be in coding, in what I expect from an IDE. It's been nice to very rapidly gain ground these past couple years.