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I can do the very basics of VIM (like exit it). Can anyone tell me what I would gain over Pycharm (when most of my work is done there) as the learning curve se

by collyw 7y ago

I can do the very basics of VIM (like exit it). Can anyone tell me what I would gain over Pycharm (when most of my work is done there) as the learning curve seems steep?

mikorym 7y ago
This may be a useful or a detrimental comment, but I would say if you see yourself as a developer, then Pycharm may win out. If you see yourself as a more low level coder then vim may win out. The main advantage of vim to me is homogeneity across different platforms and languages. Oh yeah, and the next question is do you love your terminal? Are you the type of person that would browse the web with your terminal and write ToDo lists in your terminal? If not, again Pycharm may be the preferred candidate.
kd5bjo 7y ago
The main benefit is that the effort to learn Vim is transferrable to other programming languages and environments. Editing a config file over SSH is the same as working with Python is the same as working with Javascript. This gets especially convenient if you work with multi-language projects, where you would otherwise find yourself switching between programming environments for a single task.
kace91 7y ago
As for what do you gain, it's basically the same jump as copypasting by using ctrl+c/ ctrl+v vs. using your mouse to go to the top bar and clicking edit-> copy then edit->paste. What I mean is that it's one of those computer skills that, after you learn it, even watching over the shoulder of someone who doesn't use it is painful. As for vim vs pycharm, I wouldn't advise to switch. I would advice to find vim emulation for your current editor (vscode's is superb).
Lio 7y ago
I think this is possibly the wrong way to look at it. Both Pycharm (and the JetBrains core IDE) and Vim have large feature sets and those feature sets can be extended via plugins. So saying what you would gain from one to the other is not straight forward. You gain some things and loose others. For example Vim keeps it's undo system as a tree whereas most GUI apps keep their undo commands as a stack. i.e. if you have series of edits and you undo 2 and then make a new change the other two edits are lost. In Vim they aren't, the tree of edits can be navigated at will. Assuming that undo tree is a useful feature to you (it is for me) I'd have to do a good search of Pycharm plugins before I can say it's a definite advantage of Vim. Equally you might find that Pycharm has some code aware feature that Vim can't provide via an LSP plugin or VS Code extension in which case you'd want to stay using Pycharm.

by collyw 7y ago

I can do the very basics of VIM (like exit it). Can anyone tell me what I would gain over Pycharm (when most of my work is done there) as the learning curve seems steep?

mikorym 7y ago

This may be a useful or a detrimental comment, but I would say if you see yourself as a developer, then Pycharm may win out. If you see yourself as a more low level coder then vim may win out. The main advantage of vim to me is homogeneity across different platforms and languages. Oh yeah, and the next question is do you love your terminal? Are you the type of person that would browse the web with your terminal and write ToDo lists in your terminal? If not, again Pycharm may be the preferred candidate.

kd5bjo 7y ago

The main benefit is that the effort to learn Vim is transferrable to other programming languages and environments. Editing a config file over SSH is the same as working with Python is the same as working with Javascript. This gets especially convenient if you work with multi-language projects, where you would otherwise find yourself switching between programming environments for a single task.

kace91 7y ago

As for what do you gain, it's basically the same jump as copypasting by using ctrl+c/ ctrl+v vs. using your mouse to go to the top bar and clicking edit-> copy then edit->paste. What I mean is that it's one of those computer skills that, after you learn it, even watching over the shoulder of someone who doesn't use it is painful. As for vim vs pycharm, I wouldn't advise to switch. I would advice to find vim emulation for your current editor (vscode's is superb).

Lio 7y ago

I think this is possibly the wrong way to look at it. Both Pycharm (and the JetBrains core IDE) and Vim have large feature sets and those feature sets can be extended via plugins. So saying what you would gain from one to the other is not straight forward. You gain some things and loose others. For example Vim keeps it's undo system as a tree whereas most GUI apps keep their undo commands as a stack. i.e. if you have series of edits and you undo 2 and then make a new change the other two edits are lost. In Vim they aren't, the tree of edits can be navigated at will. Assuming that undo tree is a useful feature to you (it is for me) I'd have to do a good search of Pycharm plugins before I can say it's a definite advantage of Vim. Equally you might find that Pycharm has some code aware feature that Vim can't provide via an LSP plugin or VS Code extension in which case you'd want to stay using Pycharm.