5 ms·

A better vim sounds great. That said I suspect most people would be better off learning a good IDE properly, including but not limited to: * effective navigat

A better vim sounds great. That said I suspect most people would be better off learning a good IDE properly, including but not limited to: * effective navigation and selection using modifier keys and search * built in refactoring * project wide as well as single file search/replace, -and this includes regex search AND replace. This should be quite doable in less than a week compared to a few months to get equally effective in vim. Edit: let me add that parts of this looks like a huge improvement over vim.

kqr 10y ago
But if you are like me and work in many different languages, you'll have to spend 10 weeks to learn 10 different IDEs, rather than 8 months to learn one Vim.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  The ones I have used (IntelliJ, Netbeans and eclipse) were quite effortless to jump between. I doubt Visual Studio will be much harder. Jetbrains covers Ruby, Python, JS, C and more and it would surprise me bigtime if those language specific versions aren't quite similar to the plain Java version as well.
  - throwaway109211 10y ago
    I think Vim is far easier to learn than Visual Studio. The menus are completely unintuitive, bureaucratic and painful to use. I always use cl.exe from the command line with Makefiles.
    - gbersac 10y ago
      I think it is very hard to be more unintuitive than vim.
      - throwaway991872 10y ago
        Vim is unintuitive at first, but there's excellent documentation. With Visual Studio, the documentation is horrible, you always encounter stale links to unorganized and regularly changing microsoft.com websites. Relatively basic things are left unexplained and documentation is outsourced to Stackoverflow: 1) How do I restore the output window I clicked it away in order to make the editor usable in the first place? 2) What the heck is a "project" and why do I need one? 3) Why do I need so many frigging clicks to get to the debugger (the debugger itself is nice though I have to admit)? The list goes on an on. All these things are far simpler with vim and gdb: Need to debug x87 fpu registers? One simple google search and you have an instructive plaintext website that tells you everything and off you go.
        gbersac 10y ago
        I don't know about visual studio, but I use IDEA which have a pretty good documentation. Far better than vim's one. And I need less because things are quite intuitive in IDEA.
        ZenoArrow 10y ago
        >"1) How do I restore the output window I clicked it away in order to make the editor usable in the first place?" There are many ways, it comes down to personal preference. For example, would you prefer restoring the Output window using a keyboard or a mouse? >"2) What the heck is a "project" and why do I need one?" The same reason you probably use a makefile when working with Vim, to manage your dependencies and build configurations. >"3) Why do I need so many frigging clicks to get to the debugger (the debugger itself is nice though I have to admit)?" I don't know what you're talking about here, the debugger is accessible with hardly any effort at all. How many clicks are you using to bring it up? >"The list goes on an on. All these things are far simpler with vim and gdb: Need to debug x87 fpu registers? One simple google search and you have an instructive plaintext website that tells you everything and off you go." Depends on your use cases. I've personally never found MSDN documentation lacking, plus it's ridiculously easy to use. For example, when coding in C#, highlight a language keyword and press F1, you'll be brought to online documentation about that language feature.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      How long have you used each of them and for what?
    - to3m 10y ago
      Why not stop using the menus then? ;) Visual Studio can be operated pretty much entirely from the keyboard. The default shortcuts are fairly sensible, and you can always add more from the options. There is one major omission: changing build configuration or build target. (You can give the configuration manager a keyboard shortcut, and do it that way, but it's a bit unwieldy.) So I keep the relevant widget in the toolbar and use the mouse to do it. And there are a few things I haven't bothered to assign keyboard shortcuts to, on account of how rarely I use them. But in general, I use the keyboard to perform actions, and it doesn't feel like I use the mouse any more than I do with emacs (which I use without scrollbar, toolbar, or menu bar). I do use the mouse a lot for moving the cursor and selecting text in both cases. (Visual Studio is actually slightly better for this, because you can Ctrl+drag to get word selection.)
      - throwaway991872 10y ago
        > Why not stop using the menus then? ;) Because you have to learn more commands/shortcuts than in Vim? ;)
        twblalock 10y ago
        When you are trying to learn a new thing, and you refuse to learn more than you already know, you are guaranteeing that you will be disappointed. If you aren't willing to learn more than the Vim shortcuts, it's unfair to criticize Visual Studio or any other product. You are the problem.
        reitanqild 10y ago
        Won't say anything bad about vim, I use it on a daily basis but normal IDEs aren't necessarily as bad as some people seem to want to portray them: A few hints to get reasonably good, fast: Use ctrl+arrowleft/arrowright to jump words at a time. Use shift to select as you move. This works together so ctrl + shift + arrowright means select to the next word boundary. At keast in some IDEs this will also stop at word boundaries inside a variable or function name but this should be configurable. I prefer it this way though. Next: in the menus you'll often see a hint that tells you a direct shortkey for that menu option. This holds true for both window menus on the top as well as in the right click context menu.
notheguyouthink 10y ago
> That said I suspect most people would be better off learning a good IDE properly, including but not limited to: To be clear, do you think a "good IDE" is inherently better than Vim/Kako for most people? Personally i don't see a difference in a GUI based editor and a text based editor. In fact, i quite prefer text based, because it forces an editor to treat the keyboard as a first class citizen - GUI IDEs can get lazy and revert to mouse whenever they please. I can see the argument that Vim might not be inherently as good as a "good" GUI editor, but i don't think that is a negative towards the potential of text based editors. It just means that we need new editors to focus on the UX, imo. With that said, i'll be quite glad that we're moving towards standardizing (of sorts) a code editor protocol so that new editors don't suffer from lack of tooling. It will be great to see a single set of tooling (formatting, linting, imports, syntax checking, etc) plug into any new editor that might pop up. Switching editors has enough friction, tooling shouldn't be one.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  To be clear, do you think a "good IDE" is inherently better than Vim/Kako for most people? Right now, for most people: very much yes. Personally i don't see a difference in a GUI based editor and a text based editor. In fact, i quite prefer text based, because it forces an editor to treat the keyboard as a first class citizen - GUI IDEs can get lazy and revert to mouse whenever they please. Fair point. However: Between the default keybindings of Netbeans on Windows or Linux and the simplicity of customising it to my hearts content I haven't found any reason to abandon it. I can see the argument that Vim might not be inherently as good as a "good" GUI editor, but i don't think that is a negative towards the potential of text based editors. It just means that we need new editors to focus on the UX, imo. Here is where I'll argue that the main advantage of the big IDEs are that they have focused on UX for years.
  - notheguyouthink 10y ago
    > Here is where I'll argue that the main advantage of the big IDEs are that they have focused on UX for years. Yea, i definitely agree there. It's also that GUI IDEs tend to cater towards.. well, a different crowd. What that means in real world terms in often a product with rough edges, confusing patterns, and a horribly steep learning curve. I enjoy seeing products and languages (programming) focus on learning as core feature of the product. It really is inherently important to a projects success.

kqr 10y ago

But if you are like me and work in many different languages, you'll have to spend 10 weeks to learn 10 different IDEs, rather than 8 months to learn one Vim.

reitanqild 10y ago
The ones I have used (IntelliJ, Netbeans and eclipse) were quite effortless to jump between. I doubt Visual Studio will be much harder. Jetbrains covers Ruby, Python, JS, C and more and it would surprise me bigtime if those language specific versions aren't quite similar to the plain Java version as well.
- throwaway109211 10y ago
  I think Vim is far easier to learn than Visual Studio. The menus are completely unintuitive, bureaucratic and painful to use. I always use cl.exe from the command line with Makefiles.
  - gbersac 10y ago
    I think it is very hard to be more unintuitive than vim.
    - throwaway991872 10y ago
      Vim is unintuitive at first, but there's excellent documentation. With Visual Studio, the documentation is horrible, you always encounter stale links to unorganized and regularly changing microsoft.com websites. Relatively basic things are left unexplained and documentation is outsourced to Stackoverflow: 1) How do I restore the output window I clicked it away in order to make the editor usable in the first place? 2) What the heck is a "project" and why do I need one? 3) Why do I need so many frigging clicks to get to the debugger (the debugger itself is nice though I have to admit)? The list goes on an on. All these things are far simpler with vim and gdb: Need to debug x87 fpu registers? One simple google search and you have an instructive plaintext website that tells you everything and off you go.
      - gbersac 10y ago
        I don't know about visual studio, but I use IDEA which have a pretty good documentation. Far better than vim's one. And I need less because things are quite intuitive in IDEA.
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        >"1) How do I restore the output window I clicked it away in order to make the editor usable in the first place?" There are many ways, it comes down to personal preference. For example, would you prefer restoring the Output window using a keyboard or a mouse? >"2) What the heck is a "project" and why do I need one?" The same reason you probably use a makefile when working with Vim, to manage your dependencies and build configurations. >"3) Why do I need so many frigging clicks to get to the debugger (the debugger itself is nice though I have to admit)?" I don't know what you're talking about here, the debugger is accessible with hardly any effort at all. How many clicks are you using to bring it up? >"The list goes on an on. All these things are far simpler with vim and gdb: Need to debug x87 fpu registers? One simple google search and you have an instructive plaintext website that tells you everything and off you go." Depends on your use cases. I've personally never found MSDN documentation lacking, plus it's ridiculously easy to use. For example, when coding in C#, highlight a language keyword and press F1, you'll be brought to online documentation about that language feature.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    How long have you used each of them and for what?
  - to3m 10y ago
    Why not stop using the menus then? ;) Visual Studio can be operated pretty much entirely from the keyboard. The default shortcuts are fairly sensible, and you can always add more from the options. There is one major omission: changing build configuration or build target. (You can give the configuration manager a keyboard shortcut, and do it that way, but it's a bit unwieldy.) So I keep the relevant widget in the toolbar and use the mouse to do it. And there are a few things I haven't bothered to assign keyboard shortcuts to, on account of how rarely I use them. But in general, I use the keyboard to perform actions, and it doesn't feel like I use the mouse any more than I do with emacs (which I use without scrollbar, toolbar, or menu bar). I do use the mouse a lot for moving the cursor and selecting text in both cases. (Visual Studio is actually slightly better for this, because you can Ctrl+drag to get word selection.)
    - throwaway991872 10y ago
      > Why not stop using the menus then? ;) Because you have to learn more commands/shortcuts than in Vim? ;)
      - twblalock 10y ago
        When you are trying to learn a new thing, and you refuse to learn more than you already know, you are guaranteeing that you will be disappointed. If you aren't willing to learn more than the Vim shortcuts, it's unfair to criticize Visual Studio or any other product. You are the problem.
      - reitanqild 10y ago
        Won't say anything bad about vim, I use it on a daily basis but normal IDEs aren't necessarily as bad as some people seem to want to portray them: A few hints to get reasonably good, fast: Use ctrl+arrowleft/arrowright to jump words at a time. Use shift to select as you move. This works together so ctrl + shift + arrowright means select to the next word boundary. At keast in some IDEs this will also stop at word boundaries inside a variable or function name but this should be configurable. I prefer it this way though. Next: in the menus you'll often see a hint that tells you a direct shortkey for that menu option. This holds true for both window menus on the top as well as in the right click context menu.

notheguyouthink 10y ago

> That said I suspect most people would be better off learning a good IDE properly, including but not limited to: To be clear, do you think a "good IDE" is inherently better than Vim/Kako for most people? Personally i don't see a difference in a GUI based editor and a text based editor. In fact, i quite prefer text based, because it forces an editor to treat the keyboard as a first class citizen - GUI IDEs can get lazy and revert to mouse whenever they please. I can see the argument that Vim might not be inherently as good as a "good" GUI editor, but i don't think that is a negative towards the potential of text based editors. It just means that we need new editors to focus on the UX, imo. With that said, i'll be quite glad that we're moving towards standardizing (of sorts) a code editor protocol so that new editors don't suffer from lack of tooling. It will be great to see a single set of tooling (formatting, linting, imports, syntax checking, etc) plug into any new editor that might pop up. Switching editors has enough friction, tooling shouldn't be one.

reitanqild 10y ago
To be clear, do you think a "good IDE" is inherently better than Vim/Kako for most people? Right now, for most people: very much yes. Personally i don't see a difference in a GUI based editor and a text based editor. In fact, i quite prefer text based, because it forces an editor to treat the keyboard as a first class citizen - GUI IDEs can get lazy and revert to mouse whenever they please. Fair point. However: Between the default keybindings of Netbeans on Windows or Linux and the simplicity of customising it to my hearts content I haven't found any reason to abandon it. I can see the argument that Vim might not be inherently as good as a "good" GUI editor, but i don't think that is a negative towards the potential of text based editors. It just means that we need new editors to focus on the UX, imo. Here is where I'll argue that the main advantage of the big IDEs are that they have focused on UX for years.
- notheguyouthink 10y ago
  > Here is where I'll argue that the main advantage of the big IDEs are that they have focused on UX for years. Yea, i definitely agree there. It's also that GUI IDEs tend to cater towards.. well, a different crowd. What that means in real world terms in often a product with rough edges, confusing patterns, and a horribly steep learning curve. I enjoy seeing products and languages (programming) focus on learning as core feature of the product. It really is inherently important to a projects success.