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In the conclusion the author says "It may not replace an IDE if you’re coding in Java or C++, especially if you’re using Frameworks and auto-complete is helping

• keithnz 7y ago
  other than a notepad replacement, I don't really use Vim. But I do use VsVim in Visual Studio and also have a guide on how to do that with R#, I use Vim emulation in all the Jetbrains products as it's really well done, also in VSCode, Vimium in all my browsers. Also use AutoHotKey to add Vimish type navigation to windows controls.
  • mxschumacher 7y ago
    For me it's i3 as a linux desktop wm that uses Vim bindings - really handy. Agree on Vimium in Chrome - I have to check whether it's available on Firefox. I've never heard of R# (and it's hard to Google) - what is it?
    • StreakyCobra 7y ago
      For firefox I am using https://github.com/ueokande/vim-vixen https://github.com/ueokande/vim-vixen
    • bovine3dom 7y ago
      Vimium is available for Firefox [1]. There are actually quite a few others too: Saka-key, Surfingkeys, Vim-Vixen (as a sibling has mentioned), VVimpulation and, last-but-most-janky, Tridactyl [2]. It'd be remiss of me not to mention Qutebrowser which is a standalone affair. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ [2]: I can slag Tridactyl off as I wrote a lot of it. It's still my favourite one.
      • alpaca128 7y ago
        The best thing about Qutebrowser is that it's not only standalone but also it's 100% controllable via keyboard. This is simply not possible with other browsers where the UI outside the actual website was only designed with a mouse cursor in mind. And that contradicts the idea of not constantly needing to switch to the mouse and back.
        • bovine3dom 7y ago
          I agree, but I don't really use Tridactyl to replace the mouse - I use it for operations that would otherwise not be easy or possible (e.g. `b` and `B` to search through the titles of open tabs) or a favourite of mine, cloning a repository from Git{Hub,Lab} and opening a terminal in that folder. Some of this lack of concern for using the cursor is probably because all of the keyboards I use have trackpoints.
      • jakecopp 7y ago
        Thanks so much for working on Tridactyl, it significantly improves my quality of life and saves my wrists! I'll be sure to donate once I have a full time income. Why do you say it's janky? I love it and it feels pretty polished! The only issue I have is when selecting the HN upvote/downvote arrow links with 'f' the letter hints overlap :D
        • bovine3dom 7y ago
          General jank that gets on my nerves: - `gi` doesn't work reliably on enough pages for it to be useful, ditto for `g;`. - we outright break a handful of websites unless you `seturl [url] noiframe true` - our mini-language is dreadfully inconsistent (e.g. `winopen -private` but also `hint -qb`). Corollary: composite commands steal semi-colons from JavaScript. - most importantly, entering stuff into the command line is not a pleasant experience compared to our competitors due to lag and various things that block input but shouldn't (this is worse on Windows and generally gets worse the bigger and older your Firefox profile is) I still like it, though. I'm glad you do too! For your problem, I'd suggest making site specific binds: e.g. `bindurl news.ycombinator.com ;u hint -Jc [title="upvote"]` and, as a guess, `bindurl news.ycombinator.com ;d hint -Jc [title="downvote"]`, but I'm not cool enough to have downvote buttons so I don't actually know if that last one will work.
    • theta_d 7y ago
      R# == JetBrains ReSharper, a Visual Studio plugin that adds a ton of functionality.
  • mihaifm 7y ago
    > Also use AutoHotKey to add Vimish type navigation to windows controls. I attempted to create something like this some years ago: https://github.com/mihaifm/vim.ahk https://github.com/mihaifm/vim.ahk It's pretty difficult, applications have vastly different behaviour even in regard to simple commands. Still, it was a fun experiment.
• clktmr 7y ago
  Vim has really good language server integration via multiple competing plugins (vim-lsp, ale, coc.vim, neovim). You can use the same language servers from VSCode, which give you autocomplete, code-formatting, refactoring, etc. Not having to leave the terminal and vim's responsiveness are still a big pluses for me.
  • meddlepal 7y ago
    My experience with language servers in VSCode has been less than stellar (looking at you Golang integration). I just haven't found anything as responsive as IntelliJ's custom embedded autocomplete/code-formatting/refactoring capabilities yet... everything else is just inferior feeling.
  • yoz-y 7y ago
    I never had much success in setting autocompletion in Vim. Jumping to symbols somewhat works but since the editor itself is not build-aware it always gets thing like include paths wrong. Maybe with editorconfig.json or something it would work better, but in the end I found completion in dedicated IDEs always much better.
    • Asooka 7y ago
      Language servers are supposed to mitigate that - they're supposed to be build aware and know all about include paths etc. For the C family this is usually done by having CMake write out a compile_commands.json file as part of its configure step, which is then picked up by the language server. Other languages should have their own methods. I still use build-unaware indexing, i.e. ctags, because it's simpler, faster and lets me look up things that aren't part of the current build configuration without having to switch builds.
• rvense 7y ago
  To me, the key commands are only half of why I stay on Vim, and the half I'd be most willing to give up. It's as much about living on the command line and 10-15 years of having Unix a ctrl+z or tmux split-pane away. I'd like to have some of the refactoring facilities you find in IDEs, but I'd prefer to have them as separate tools, commands you run, rather than moving everything into one window.
  • soVeryTired 7y ago
    Out of interest, how do you go about debugging code when you live on the command line? In an editor you have nice features like a visualisation of the call stack, and the ability to set watches and conditional breakpoints. Are there vim equivalents, or do you live without? FWIW I'm using vim bindings in VS code.
    • non-entity 7y ago
      I imagine you use something like GDB which has different commands to do that stuff. For example quick Google search reveals [this](http://www.it.uc3m.es/pbasanta/asng/course_notes/debugger_condbreak_en.html http://www.it.uc3m.es/pbasanta/asng/course_notes/debugger_co...) for conditional breakpoints (haven't used a command line debugger in forever tho)
    • rvense 7y ago
      Depends on the environment, but a lot of print/exception-based debugging as you'd expect, or use REPLs when they're available. I do a lot of web work currently and occasionally use the debugger in Firefox. I have also used GDB in other contexts. I don't really feel like I'm too lacking in this department, but maybe the things I do aren't too complex.
    • R0flcopt3r 7y ago
      I use this plugin for debugging. Works a treat! https://github.com/sakhnik/nvim-gdb https://github.com/sakhnik/nvim-gdb GDB is also extensible as hell, and I can’t imagine vs code has something gdb doesn’t.
    • 7y ago
• Insanity 7y ago
  Same here, but IJ does sometimes fubar when updating VIM :(
• GGfpc 7y ago
  I tried, but I missed a lot of thinks like being able to click a random line instead of down down down down. Or selections. Commands are good but I pretty much just use find and replace in vim.
  • drbojingle 7y ago
    You don't have to click down multiple times. If you want to go somewhere specific there are too many ways to list tbh but they're all faster than arrow keys or mouse clicks. I'm a big fan of the EasyMotion https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion approach myself but the built-in search functionality + tag navigation is also good.
• drbojingle 7y ago
  I like this approach and used it for some time but I ended up going in the other direction ultimately and configured neovim to be a customized IDE. The setup isn't for the faint of heart but I find tinkering with it quite relaxing and enjoyable.
• pletnes 7y ago
  I completely agree. I still keep vim nearby, as it’s everywhere, fast on large data files, and has some power tools for editing plain text that «code editors» just don’t have.
• Aperocky 7y ago
  I do the same, however, there's one thing annoying and that is the lack of macros for these ported vim bindings. `norm` command also doesn't work for intellij (along with many other more obscure vim commands)
• nickjj 7y ago
  Vim binds are definitely great but using terminal Vim is more than just the mappings. Everyone uses Vim differently but I tend to combo it with tmux. For example I often have 8+ active tmux sessions (1 for each freelance contract I'm working on + personal stuff). Each tmux session has 1 or more Vim instances running, so switching between each session is 1 key stroke away. It's effortless to jump between them and the state of those sessions are always around (even persisting across reboots with tmux-resurrect). It also takes up close to no resources (a few megabytes per Vim instance).
• kerkeslager 7y ago
  > - is trivial to set up (in stark contrast to configuring a untouched Vim/Nvim install from the ground up) 1. Part of the joy of vim is not configuring it. A ton of the plugins out there exist because the creators didn't know that a feature already existed in vim, and many of them break existing keybindings. Beyond a few small configurations, I use vim as my daily editor largely untouched. A big upside to this is that I can log on to almost any server and have an editor that is pretty close to what I use anyway. 2. My configuration process is (assume you're in ~): git@github.com:kerkeslager/dotfiles.git cp dotfiles/.* . This works fine for pretty complicated configurations, but if there's something that can't be configured in a dotfile, I imagine it wouldn't be hard to add a ./configure script that does the rest.
  • sullyj3 7y ago
    I generally find that whenever someone points out that a feature that a plugin implements is already present in vim, the vim native feature has atrocious UX. It feels like a personality thing, it just seems like a lot of vim users don't care very much about decent UX.
    • kerkeslager 7y ago
      Ehh, UX is a pretty vague term. If you're talking about traditional UX values like intuitiveness, sure, vim UX is terrible. But vim features tend to do very simple things, which are composable into very powerful mini programs in a lot of contexts. There's a sort of "discoverability" to them as well, in that if a key does something in one mode, it likely does something intuitively similar in another mode. All this adds up over time. I've got about 9 years using vim every day now, and the combined learning over that time has added up in a way that disposable learning like "how to use the X flavor-of-the-week plugin" would not have. Another thing here is that the UX improvement of most plugins is only surface-level. vim features tend to be very simple, which means that when you understand it, you understand it. But vim users with a lot of plugins rarely understand what is actually going on when they use a plugin feature, because the features do too much. This means that they can't really use those features in, for example, macros, which loses you a lot of the editor's power.
  • 7y ago
• crazybigdan 7y ago
  I've tried the IntelliJ vim plugin and it was lacking some features that I use regularly (I forget exactly what at the moment. Registers? the 'q:' menu? folds? quite a few plugins I now can't live without? (surround)). Another key thing is the responsiveness. Vim is just more responsive (or it feels that way to me, you may have different experiences). I am developing Java using vim + tmux at work and it for certain took a lot of time to get tweaked how I want it to be, and there are some things I've had to give up: debugging is a big one (but that's what log messages are for!), but I 've managed to cover quite some ground: I wrote a plugin to automatically add import statements based on dependencies you have listed in your build.gradle Yeah I know the image (ooo that guy thinks he's sooo l33t because he uses vim and the command-line all the time... doesn't even need intellij installed!), but I know my setup works for me and it allows me to work as fast, if not faster than my peers and get. crap. done. To each their own - I make sure that new engineers I'm on-boarding have tools they need to get work done and don't fall prey to some tool-cult.
• cossatot 7y ago
  I use both vim and vscode, and I find that the vim keybindings in vscode are lacking. I particularly run into problems with substitutions, for example in vim I can do :sno... when I want to change brackets or something whereas that doesn't exist in vscode. I then have to use the native find and replace menu stuff which breaks the flow.
  • Vinnl 7y ago
    I'm not sure what `:sno` does, but changing brackets e.g. from [this] to (this) is `cs])`.
• Vinnl 7y ago
  It's also a great way to learn Vim in the first place. One motion at a time, without getting stuck when you can't recall it, or slowed down when you're in the flow.
• acolumb 7y ago
  Unrelated, but do people on HN have a different definition for the word "trivial?" It's used so frequently that I wanted some clarity. Where I come from, trivial means "of little importance," ex: The Kardashians' drama is frequently over trivial matters.
  • fedemar 7y ago
    In a mathematical/academic sense, we usually use 'trivial' for a thing that's 'easily' solved. For instance 'X is a trivial consequence of Y' or 'proof of this is trivial'.