4 ms·

Almost every modern editor has some form of vim emulator, so you can have the best of both worlds

wruza 5y ago
These don’t work for me because I made a slip and added too much vim-specifics to my editing/workflow habits. Vim emulators only work for those who have 3-5 years of non-active exploration experience. Once you commit to plugins, buffer/window-related actions, scripts, hooks, heavy vimfiles setup, etc, the way back is as hard. Edit: please don’t downvote the parent commenter, it’s a non-obvious knowledge and it doesn’t apply to everyone.
- h0l0cube 5y ago
  Yeah okay, I understand emulation is a subset, but surely a modern IDE takes care of most of the productivity gains you get from customization and adds a few more, like the context/AST-aware refactoring you find in Jetbrains IDEs Edit: I spent a long time trying to make Vim more IDE-like, but found it was more productive to make my various IDEs more Vim-like, but I concede that might not be suitable for everyone
  - wruza 5y ago
    Yeah, I’m also leaning to just learn the heck out of vscode internals and tune it to my own needs maybe via custom plugins, instead of running behind the train. Sometimes investments just stop returning, and you have to make bold moves want it or not.
  - zingar 5y ago
    Just so we don't compare apples and oranges: The refactoring tooling in jetbrains products is unique. I haven't seen vscode or any other ide capable of reproducing this, at least not for dynamic languages. I wouldn't use this as the basis of an argument for superiority of IDEs in general over vim. And of course there are tradeoffs, rubymine users I worked with always complained about startup times and heavy indexing. (This was a few years back, maybe it's improved since)
    - h0l0cube 5y ago
      I use VIm in vscode quite a lot, and I do reach for macros to refactor code a lot more than when I switch to a JetBrains IDE. But I couldn't see a benefit to using vim outside of vscode for these refactoring operations, so I'd be curious to know whether you do and what you use?
      - zingar 5y ago
        I'm not saying vim emulation has anything to do with refactoring, I'm saying that outside the jetbrains stable there are no refactoring tools worth speaking of, i.e. refactoring is not a variable in which IDEs in general beat vim. If you can write vim macros to extract method, push up dependencies etc, then you've made vim better than most IDEs.
- edanm 5y ago
  After many years of being in your camp, I finally made the switch to VSCode (well, first to Spacemacs, then to VScode). It's true that there are a lot of things I configured specifically in vim, however, VSCode has a pretty decent vim mode that takes care of a lot of stuff (including a bunch of pretty standard stuff that most people add to vim, like adding vim-surround for example). In addition, it has a pretty decent way to configure new commands, so most of the other stuff I missed from vim I could actually figure out how to port over to VSCode. Totally worth it for me - it was a few months of slowly rebuilding habits and porting commands from vim, but now I have a "best of both worlds" setup.
  - zingar 5y ago
    What are you getting from vscode that you didn't have in spacemacs?
    - edanm 5y ago
      First of all, setup is much easier. If something breaks, I can easily fix it. If I need a new language to be supported, it's usually a click then a 10 second install, and it usually suggests it for me (instead of having to search around). It starts faster, everything works together better, no weird plugin-compatibility issues (mostly). If I need to find a command, it's easier to lookup in VSCode than Spacemacs (because the menus use a much better GUI, with fonts, highlights, etc). If I want to switch between files, open a folder as a project, etc, it all works well, and out of the box. With Spacemacs, there isn't a good file-tree pane that I can put on the left - IIRC it comes with something like NERDTree from vim, but it never worked well for me. Partially this is the whole fonts/gui/etc limitations, partly it's because a lot of the shortcuts just don't work that well. Just quickly opening up a folder, seeing what files there are, and being able to rename a file by right-clicking on it and hitting rename is something that I don't do often, but happens once a week, and in Spacemacs, that once a week necessitated either looking it up, or fixing something. (I was faster at doing these things with vim, in which I had way more time invested, but why I switched from vim to emacs is a similar story in many ways.) Honestly, overall, VSCode and modern IDEs are just a much smoother, better overall experience in so many small and large ways, that I feel I am much more productive, and have to spend way less time tinkering with my editor. And much as I love to do that, I've been doing it for 10 years, and already have a decent set of knowledge about what I need and want. Getting it practically out of the box with VSCode, and having it work better, is a wonder. (My biggest block in switching to a different editor in all this time was that I had to have a decent VIM mode, because being able to actually edit text at speed and comfort is more important than all the other features to me. But once I realized that Spacemacs' vim mode was decent, I switched to that, and then I played around with VSCode and realized the vim mode there was decent too. Definitely enough to satisfy 95% of standard text editing use cases, with either plugins or my personal mappings making up the gap.)

These don’t work for me because I made a slip and added too much vim-specifics to my editing/workflow habits. Vim emulators only work for those who have 3-5 years of non-active exploration experience. Once you commit to plugins, buffer/window-related actions, scripts, hooks, heavy vimfiles setup, etc, the way back is as hard. Edit: please don’t downvote the parent commenter, it’s a non-obvious knowledge and it doesn’t apply to everyone.

h0l0cube 5y ago
Yeah okay, I understand emulation is a subset, but surely a modern IDE takes care of most of the productivity gains you get from customization and adds a few more, like the context/AST-aware refactoring you find in Jetbrains IDEs Edit: I spent a long time trying to make Vim more IDE-like, but found it was more productive to make my various IDEs more Vim-like, but I concede that might not be suitable for everyone
- wruza 5y ago
  Yeah, I’m also leaning to just learn the heck out of vscode internals and tune it to my own needs maybe via custom plugins, instead of running behind the train. Sometimes investments just stop returning, and you have to make bold moves want it or not.
- zingar 5y ago
  Just so we don't compare apples and oranges: The refactoring tooling in jetbrains products is unique. I haven't seen vscode or any other ide capable of reproducing this, at least not for dynamic languages. I wouldn't use this as the basis of an argument for superiority of IDEs in general over vim. And of course there are tradeoffs, rubymine users I worked with always complained about startup times and heavy indexing. (This was a few years back, maybe it's improved since)
  - h0l0cube 5y ago
    I use VIm in vscode quite a lot, and I do reach for macros to refactor code a lot more than when I switch to a JetBrains IDE. But I couldn't see a benefit to using vim outside of vscode for these refactoring operations, so I'd be curious to know whether you do and what you use?
    - zingar 5y ago
      I'm not saying vim emulation has anything to do with refactoring, I'm saying that outside the jetbrains stable there are no refactoring tools worth speaking of, i.e. refactoring is not a variable in which IDEs in general beat vim. If you can write vim macros to extract method, push up dependencies etc, then you've made vim better than most IDEs.
edanm 5y ago
After many years of being in your camp, I finally made the switch to VSCode (well, first to Spacemacs, then to VScode). It's true that there are a lot of things I configured specifically in vim, however, VSCode has a pretty decent vim mode that takes care of a lot of stuff (including a bunch of pretty standard stuff that most people add to vim, like adding vim-surround for example). In addition, it has a pretty decent way to configure new commands, so most of the other stuff I missed from vim I could actually figure out how to port over to VSCode. Totally worth it for me - it was a few months of slowly rebuilding habits and porting commands from vim, but now I have a "best of both worlds" setup.
- zingar 5y ago
  What are you getting from vscode that you didn't have in spacemacs?
  - edanm 5y ago
    First of all, setup is much easier. If something breaks, I can easily fix it. If I need a new language to be supported, it's usually a click then a 10 second install, and it usually suggests it for me (instead of having to search around). It starts faster, everything works together better, no weird plugin-compatibility issues (mostly). If I need to find a command, it's easier to lookup in VSCode than Spacemacs (because the menus use a much better GUI, with fonts, highlights, etc). If I want to switch between files, open a folder as a project, etc, it all works well, and out of the box. With Spacemacs, there isn't a good file-tree pane that I can put on the left - IIRC it comes with something like NERDTree from vim, but it never worked well for me. Partially this is the whole fonts/gui/etc limitations, partly it's because a lot of the shortcuts just don't work that well. Just quickly opening up a folder, seeing what files there are, and being able to rename a file by right-clicking on it and hitting rename is something that I don't do often, but happens once a week, and in Spacemacs, that once a week necessitated either looking it up, or fixing something. (I was faster at doing these things with vim, in which I had way more time invested, but why I switched from vim to emacs is a similar story in many ways.) Honestly, overall, VSCode and modern IDEs are just a much smoother, better overall experience in so many small and large ways, that I feel I am much more productive, and have to spend way less time tinkering with my editor. And much as I love to do that, I've been doing it for 10 years, and already have a decent set of knowledge about what I need and want. Getting it practically out of the box with VSCode, and having it work better, is a wonder. (My biggest block in switching to a different editor in all this time was that I had to have a decent VIM mode, because being able to actually edit text at speed and comfort is more important than all the other features to me. But once I realized that Spacemacs' vim mode was decent, I switched to that, and then I played around with VSCode and realized the vim mode there was decent too. Definitely enough to satisfy 95% of standard text editing use cases, with either plugins or my personal mappings making up the gap.)