7 ms·

What I observe is that most vim fans who swear by it use it as a bare bones editor, syntax highlighting at most. No auto-completion, go to definition or any oth

• acqq 6y ago
  The existence of "modes" is also opposite to the approach which is know for decades to be less prone to accidental errors: having no modes and always being able to perform more undo steps. There were even the games of considering what plain text typed in wrong mode would cause the most of the damage. The main reason Vim and Emacs have their current followers is that the competing editors on Linux or Unix platforms are significantly worse (on average), not that these two are by any means any kind of the possible optimum. And boy, is the competition worse. (Personally, I use console editors only if I have to, and then prefer to use vim, but otherwise I prefer my customized low-footprint programmable GUI.)
  • nouveaux 6y ago
    The power that vim has out of the box is pretty incredible. The macro system is very easy to use and powerful. That said, it is hard to learn all these features and modern GUI IDEs are pretty amazing. You can still use vi in many of these editors.
  • u801e 6y ago
    > The existence of "modes" is also opposite to the approach which is know for decades to be less prone to accidental errors: having no modes and always being able to perform more undo steps. vim has had the multi-level undo and redo for a number of years. If I really screw up, I can always run something like :earlier 5m to get back to the state I was at 5 minutes ago. The only problem I have with some of the normal mode keystrokes is when I want to use some of the window based shortcuts and accidently press ctrl-w while my browser window is open (which closes the tab) :)
• gen220 6y ago
  I used to be like you describe, mostly because language-specific plugins were a dumpsterfire of hidden complexity, that really slowed down your editing experience. While some plugins are brilliantly-designed, it takes a long time to learn how to configure one language plugin to your tastes, and that learning is generally non-transferable to other language plugins. (vim-go fits this to the T, ime). https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale (along with the language-server movement in general) changed my perspective. I now do at least the go-to and autocomplete half of IDE things, now.
  • cercatrova 6y ago
    Have you tried language server implementations like coc.nvim? They seem to be superior to ale and others that don't use the Language Server Protocol.
    • gen220 6y ago
      I know some people at work use it, but I haven’t gotten around to trying it. What’s the advantage over using ale to compose gopls or python-language-server? Is it the fancy windows? :) I took a cursory look at their repo. I might be understanding this incorrectly, but it looks like you have to run node as a sidecar to use it? Isn’t that really intensive vs ALE? I figure if I wanted to run V8, one might as well use VSC, which after all is an electron app. :)
• nouveaux 6y ago
  Yea the dark side of Vim is that it is at best IDE light. With coc, it has gotten better but still far behind vscode. It is a trade off I gladly accept to use vim and tmux. Aside from that, vim plugin for vscode is pretty good for doing pair programming with the team.
• u801e 6y ago
  > No auto-completion, go to definition or any other IDE stuff. vim has had those features for many years now, so I'm not sure why people wouldn't make use of those features unless they aren't aware of them.
  • j2kun 6y ago
    Tags! I do wish I knew how to use that feature better...