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I'm not a huge fan of vim: I used vim a lot for a 1,5 year, then switched to IDE with refactoring (CodeGuide was one of the first IDE's with refactoring for Jav
by lisivka 10y ago
I'm not a huge fan of vim: I used vim a lot for a 1,5 year, then switched to IDE with refactoring (CodeGuide was one of the first IDE's with refactoring for Java).
When a IDE supports refactoring, e.g. it can swap order of arguments in calls to function, it helps a lot. But when the IDE does not support refactoring of language of your choice, vim can help to do a refactoring of code manually much faster. For example, I may use some shell commands to refactor bunch of js/html/css/java/sql code with single or few find and perl -pie commands, all at once. When I need to do an another refactoring, I can pickup previous refactoring command from shell history or I even can put command into script, so I will have my own refactoring tool. Regular expressions are fragile when used with code, but I can undo changes with git and repeat. They are saving lot of typing, so I prefer to spend few minutes in console than a hour in IDE. Vim has lot of commands built-in, so it's even easier to do a refactoring in Vim, but IDE's built-in refactoring is still better, when available.
- hobofan 10y agoReply to the wrong comment? Regardless, I think that the missing refactoring capabilities of code editors are only a symptom of missing command line tools for refactoring. Hell, very few languages have good open source tools for linting and static analysis which is more or less a required building block for good refactoring tools.
- lisivka 10y agoI'm trying to argue why Vim may be better than regular editor with my own experience, which is not strongly sided. BTW. I also found that when I cannot use full size keyboard, e.g. phone, tablet, or netbook, vim is usable, while regular editor is hard to use because of lack of essential keys, but I rarely use phone for development.