7 ms·

It's alway pretty fascinating to me that people can actually be productive without an IDE. I've tried several times Vim and I just don't get it how you can liv

by Trufa 4y ago

It's alway pretty fascinating to me that people can actually be productive without an IDE. I've tried several times Vim and I just don't get it how you can live without certain functionalities, I'm sure that with enough tinkering you can get pretty close but, for example, search seems to always be kind of a pain in the ass for the complex queries with regex through many files and stuff like that, specially the presenting of results has never been close in my opinion as to something like IntelliJ does it. Things like "god damn, I've done goofed or I don't quite remember something" and having the internal file history with a diff readily available. Some of the click and find implementation/usages never seems to quite there to me. I could go on, if you're truly being productive and not missing out on feature, more power to you, but I honestly wonder if there's no element of fun/pride in using something like vim now-a-days, which of course is totally fine and way more important in my book (to an extent) to pure productivity. There is also the point of being able to use vim bindings inside of the IDE. Maybe I'm just an idiot that can't Vim, totally open to that idea, but I'm truly wondering how productive it actually is.

imran-iq 4y ago
Just my 2 cents on this > I don't quite remember something and having the internal file history with a diff readily available. You're already in a terminal, git is just one command away > Some of the click and find implementation/usages never seems to quite there to me. This really depends on the language you are working in, but generally vim's gd (and plugins that augment it) enough most of the time, otherwise grep/rg if you know what you are looking for. If you are using something really dynamic, e.g. ruby, then you're pretty much shit out of luck. > I could go on, if you're truly being productive and not missing out on feature, more power to you. Here's the thing, the best part about it vim is that it is not slow (plus paired with a terminal emulator like kitty/wez/alacritty). When I type the characters actually appear on the screen as I type them. With most IDE's (at least the ones I have used) there is a noticeable delay from when I have stopped typing and characters appearing on screen. Another thing to add is that vim is very fast to start up and shut down, I open and close vim multiple times as I am working. With an IDE, startup times are atrocious and dont really fit my work style of cd'ing somewhere quickly editing something, cd'ing somewhere else and rinse and repeat. In general I find the original command line tools to be much better than IDE provided equivalents or integrations, there's no unnecessary animations and much less cpu/ram usage. Though one exception for me is the database clients, where I much rather prefer a GUI than using the CLI client. Your tests are already runnable from command line (assuming CI is setup). Basically, Unix becomes your IDE
- auraham 4y ago
  > Here's the thing, the best part about it vim is that it is not slow (plus paired with a terminal emulator like kitty/wez/alacritty). When I type the characters actually appear on the screen as I type them. I just noticed that ~/.vimrc adds a small delay, even if it is empty. This is the test case: Create a file with about 10 emtpy lines and type: esc switch to normal mode gg go to the top ctrl + v, G select all lines shift + i switch to insert mode - line just type something esc this will duplicate the first line until the end of the file If you repeat the test case with no ~/.vimrc, you will notice that the lines are changed faster.
  - scajanus 4y ago
    Having a ~/.vimrc, even if empty, sets 'nocompatible'.
- andresgaitan 4y ago
  "When I type the characters actually appear on the screen as I type them" Great quote. Perhaps one of the best arguments for using Vim
aidos 4y ago
You have to invest time in your vim setup. There’s a whole lot built in that you need to learn, but you also need to customise it to your workflow. In terms of searching through multiple files, I use Telescope with ripgrep and fzf. It’s an insanely slick workflow that allows me to jump around code faster than anything else I’ve used in my last 25 years of coding.
- sibit 4y ago
  This, 100%. It took me an hour the first time I configured neovim and another hour when everything broke during the v0.8 update but the ability to navigate multiple files without touching my mouse make it worth the effort. I still have to use Visual Studio for {dayjob} but the Vim binding plugin makes it (almost) tolerable. The icing on the cake is when I need to SSH into a server to debug some PHP or JS on a testing server. I know I can always open Vim for a slightly degraded (compared to my Neovim setup) but overall solid editor at any time.
  - throwaway_au_1 4y ago
    Regarding the last part of your comment: you may get some value out of this plugin, https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/distant.nvim https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/distant.nvim, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVAsbpByQ3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVAsbpByQ3o. I've not used it but your use case made me wonder if there's a nice way to do it, as I regularly SSH into my NAS and RPi's, so I had a quick search.
anotherhue 4y ago
IMO it’s because you’re conflating vim with an IDE. But really it’s unix that’s the IDE. I’ll use vim to literally edit files, and then in an alternative tmux pane either run my tests or ‘entr’ my source or ‘rg’ to search or git —-bless or whatever… Editor + shell + tools is the IDE. And I like that I can swap out tools as necessary.
- aidos 4y ago
  And should you want to do any of that from vim, you can (and you can customise it exactly how you want).
ar_lan 4y ago
Neovim user, so a little different. I used to regularly use GoLand for ~3 years before I made the full switch over, and am a bit of an evangelist of it. I'm simply faster in it. I'd probably say the initial main attractor was modal editing (vim-mode plugins in Jetbrains are not my favorite - usually not a full implementation of the real features vim offers). * For syntax highlighting: tree-sitter is as good, if not better in my experience. * For auto-complete/navigation/etc: LSP support + a small few plugins solve this, running on par with what GoLand offers. * Search support, like the case you mentioned - I use Telescope + Ripgrep and usually my searches are roughly the same time to process as GoLand did. Are there other features that are drastically important? Because the other features Neovim offers over GoLand are: * It's way faster to load. Indexing in GoLand takes so long. LSP servers do usually take a bit of time to index but this is on the order of minutes faster than GoLand takes for the projects I have to use at work. * Significantly less memory consumption. * I can be purely keyboard driven. * Modal editing and all the niceties that come with that (note: emulators are always subpar in my experience). * Being already in the terminal is a significant advantage, especially on my laptop screen (less-so on my ultrawide). * Customizability is a lower priority, but it is still worth mentioning - there's only so much you can do to customize a Jetbrains editor. I am far more productive using it than I ever was with GoLand. I might make the exception for IntelliJ when I used to do Kotlin work - but that's the exception, not the rule. For every other language I definitely prefer Neovim. I think, like all tools, it's important to spend the time to learn it (if you desire to actually use it). Otherwise, of course vim will just look like some archaic tool that seems like it lacks all modern support.
- aidos 4y ago
  Treesitter is amazing. We have a bunch of sql strings in python and I was able to drop a couple of lines into my injections.scm to isolate them and get perfect sql highlighting within my python code.
  - lordgroff 4y ago
    I didn't even know you could do that, this is why I come to this site.
poszlem 4y ago
This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, especially since listening to John Carmack interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4) and him saying that almost nobody uses IDEs at Meta. I think it is totally possible to be (even very) productive in VIM. I do think, though, that a person who is productive in VIM would be more productive if he used a proper IDE. This is my experience after I had been using VIM for about 10 years and switched to an IntelliJ IDE (and actually learned it) (This, of course, assumes that there is a proper IDE for your language)
- ar_lan 4y ago
  > that a person who is productive in VIM would be more productive if he used a proper IDE. What features does a "proper IDE" offer that, at least Neovim, does not or cannot provide?
  - urthor 4y ago
    Complex IDEs offer a promise (backed by $$$). Class hierarchy visualization, database schema mappings, the latest & greatest in NLP & code completion via plugins. That "just works." Ultimately, a sufficient amount of configuration adds all those things to Vim/Emacs. Ditto VS Code on a smaller scale. The issue is how much time. I use all the obscure features of IDEs. Navigate to next issue, bookmarks, you name it, I've got it, for large codes. Implementing... all... of the features Intellij/Rider provides out of the box for JVM/React stack in Vim is... an undertaking. Don't get me wrong. I love SpaceVim, and if I worked in a domain like firmware, I'd be far more comfortable with it. Maintaining a Vim config that's integrates every tool I need for JVM and React (and machine learning, and all the other domains) is impossible.
brian_cloutier 4y ago
I've used vim for a while now and using it isn't a point of pride, it's more that whenever I try an IDE I wonder how anybody could be productive using it. I've rarely had a problem with search, I can type `:grep [some regex]` and I'm quickly shown all matches for that regex in the entire project. I admit I'm not sure how I would do a more complicated query, but this is almost always enough, what kinds of queries do you do which this doesn't cover? There's just one exception, I'm currently working in a codebase where members have very generic names, `Nonce` is a valid field name for a number of different structs, which makes search results for `Nonce` tedious to work through. For this situation I've added a keybinding which calls semgrep and lets me view all references for a specific struct's `Nonce` field. Calling out to semgrep is an instance of a more general pattern: Because vim is not integrated I lean on tools outside of vim when necessary. The `git` cli, especially once you add some aliases, gives fine access to file history and diffs. The feature I'm most jealous of is debugger integration. `gdb` and `dlv` get the job done but it's really convenient to be able step through your code with the same interface you use to write it. > There is also the point of being able to use vim bindings inside of the IDE Every vim keybinding re implementation I've tried has been missing essential features. When I'm inside an IDE I spend much of my time typing and navigating. When I'm inside vim I'm _thinking_, and the necessary changes occur about as quickly as I decide upon them.
- aidos 4y ago
  I don’t use debuggers myself, but I think they’re pretty well supported within vim (neovim at least) these days https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap
  - Jorengarenar 4y ago
    Vimspector: https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector
- kazinator 4y ago
  About :grep, try integrating GNU id-utils with Vim. GNU id-utils provides a mkid command which scans a directory of files to build a binary index file called ID. The lid tool is used to query this and provides a grep-compatible mode. lid sometimes puts out things in a funny order, so I sort the output. :set grepprg=lid\ --word\ --result=grep\ '$*'\ \\\|\ sort\ -n\ -t\ :\ -k\ 2 This is basically instant even on huge file trees. Or, if you'd like :grep to use git grep: :set grepprg=git\ grep\ -n\ '$*'
scruple 4y ago
When I need an interactive debugger, I alt-tab into a JetBrains product or VS/VSCode. The only time in my career that I wasn't primarily developing inside of vim/neovim and now Emacs was when I was working on a .NET team.
- ithrow 4y ago
  Why did you switch from vim/neovim to emacs?
  - scruple 4y ago
    I wanted magit and org-mode.
pmoriarty 4y ago
I feel pretty much the opposite. IDE's seem incredibly limiting and feature-poor compared to editors like vim and emacs, which can do just about anything. Regarding your specific examples, both vim and emacs have file histories and if your files are under version control it's easy to get diffs. Searches are super powerful in both vim and emacs, and it's easy to search across multiple files as well using various scripts/plugins. The main downside to using editors like vim and emacs is that you have to be a pretty advanced user of them and spend a lot of time configuring them to really feel their power. If you've just dipped your toes in they're not going to look very impressive and you'll likely be disappointed.. but invest the time and they're very hard if not impossible to beat.
- kioleanu 4y ago
  Can vim and/or emacs do refactoring? That is a feature that I use daily and couldn’t live without
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    Yes. Well, Emacs definitely can, and I have no doubt Vim can with the same tooling. For example, Emacs has excellent support for LSP. If a language server exists for your favorite language, and it supports refactoring, then so does Emacs.
  - aidos 4y ago
    You’ll find that most of what happens behind the scenes in vscode is available in neovim (and probably vim and emacs). The heavy lifting is done by lsps these days. One notable exception is that neovim has treesitter, so you get immediate semantic analysis on your code which allows for much more flexible refactoring. Like everything in vim, you need to spend time setting these things up to streamline your common workflows.
  - Keyframe 4y ago
    Of course, both coc and lsp are your friends there. Want to change variable or function of class name or whatever? No problem. Take this piece of code and wrap it into a function, and where it once stood just place the function call? No problem. Etc.
kioleanu 4y ago
I was contemplating the same thing today as I was knee deep in refactoring a piece of code - I use IntelliJ and ideavim, which I find great because it also implements (emulates?) a small subset of vim plugins. I was able to finish the fairly complex refactoring in half an hour, without taking my hands off the keyboard by using a fairly strong combination of vim and IDE features. This is what works for me. I use an IntelliJ plugin that notifies me when I could’ve used a shortcut but I clicked with the mouse instead. It also counts the times I missed a shortcut. I keep a pretty low count but I was watching a colleague that had the same plugin and he had missed a certain shortcut 22k times. He is as productive as I am, so to each his own
- kingboss 4y ago
  What is with this obsession of never taking the hands of the keyboard? I've seen it so many times and it makes no sense to me. I don't find myself limited by the speed of typing but by the speed of thinking.
mikebenfield 4y ago
Although I recognize that theoretically there are features in an IDE that could be useful, every time I've tried to use one I find it intrusive and slow and frustrating and confusing. I inevitably close it in a rage within 15 minutes because of some design decision that I find infuriatingly stupid. neovim plus a couple extensions plus some Unix command line tools are just so simple and convenient.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Why did you spend time to figure out and set up vim, tools, and extensions, but only spend 15 minutes with an IDE? vim's "design decision" to have extensions and external tools that you need to manually string together somehow is just as infuriating.
keithnz 4y ago
IdeaVim in the jetbrains products is really good I find. You get best of both worlds. I used to customize vim a lot, but I pretty much just use it as is now as a casual editor for editing files, especially for big files. The editor is very snappy and quick to load compared to IDEs, but on a well spec'd computer you aren't really going to notice too much (depending on the IDE)
rascul 4y ago
> It's alway pretty fascinating to me that people can actually be productive without an IDE. I was coding for years before I discovered that IDEs exist. Never used one much until I started using VS Code a few years ago (if you call that an IDE, some people do and some don't).
glouwbug 4y ago
vim, grep, and find. git-grep turns your codebase into a O(logn) database
hot_gril 4y ago
There's a steep learning curve, and it's not necessary. I mainly use Vim, but it wouldn't be a big deal if I didn't. Reasons for me: - It's a lot more laptop-friendly not having to deal with a mouse and complex GUI. I even gave up my desk at work and just sit and code in random places. - On my desk at home, it's a bit faster for me than an IDE. But that depends. - Seems like IDE users are constantly switching tools, especially when changing jobs. Even at my current 4-year job, my teammates have all changed between 3 different IDEs and had to screw around with remote access problems for each. I've used Vim everywhere since college.
smeeth 4y ago
Its more of a focus thing for me. Its easier to get into the zone when I'm in a terminal with no mouse and all the GUI noise stripped away. I'm sure I'm missing out on quality of life enhancements and whatnot, but really all of those are lower on my hierarchy of needs than staying on task.
asciimov 4y ago
From my perspective, vim is just a tool that I picked up in college, back in the bad old days (early 00's) where good IDE's were paid and anything free was largely terrible. Sure IDE's are great, I love stepping through code, it really helps when you're in deep and are having problems reasoning about the state of your program. That said, every shop I've worked in used a different IDE. Possibly one picked out by some long gone coder who thought that their choice was the best. Finally not being saddled to any one IDE lets me use the any other tool to get a job done.
- jstimpfle 4y ago
  I suppose I agree with this, I try not to obsess over the tools too much. It makes sense to have a standard IDE and standard tools in a company. However there's always a possibility to improve. One can suggest new tools to a small circle of coworkers, or just start trying out new tools on one's own. In one workplace that has a huge Windows codebase I compile and debug from within Visual Studio, and edit either in Visual Studio or sometimes vim. When I get the chance to do explorative work on a rather standalone project I gravitate towards vim, even to printf debugging, even though Visual Studio is available. I don't know why this is, old habits, or is it genuinely more economic on some axis - for new projects at least?
cjvirtucio 4y ago
the main thing that allows me to be productive with "only" vim is, funnily enough, things outside vim: bash knowledge. search, for instance, I can usually do in flexible ways with a pipeline of commands.

by Trufa 4y ago

imran-iq 4y ago

Just my 2 cents on this > I don't quite remember something and having the internal file history with a diff readily available. You're already in a terminal, git is just one command away > Some of the click and find implementation/usages never seems to quite there to me. This really depends on the language you are working in, but generally vim's gd (and plugins that augment it) enough most of the time, otherwise grep/rg if you know what you are looking for. If you are using something really dynamic, e.g. ruby, then you're pretty much shit out of luck. > I could go on, if you're truly being productive and not missing out on feature, more power to you. Here's the thing, the best part about it vim is that it is not slow (plus paired with a terminal emulator like kitty/wez/alacritty). When I type the characters actually appear on the screen as I type them. With most IDE's (at least the ones I have used) there is a noticeable delay from when I have stopped typing and characters appearing on screen. Another thing to add is that vim is very fast to start up and shut down, I open and close vim multiple times as I am working. With an IDE, startup times are atrocious and dont really fit my work style of cd'ing somewhere quickly editing something, cd'ing somewhere else and rinse and repeat. In general I find the original command line tools to be much better than IDE provided equivalents or integrations, there's no unnecessary animations and much less cpu/ram usage. Though one exception for me is the database clients, where I much rather prefer a GUI than using the CLI client. Your tests are already runnable from command line (assuming CI is setup). Basically, Unix becomes your IDE

auraham 4y ago
> Here's the thing, the best part about it vim is that it is not slow (plus paired with a terminal emulator like kitty/wez/alacritty). When I type the characters actually appear on the screen as I type them. I just noticed that ~/.vimrc adds a small delay, even if it is empty. This is the test case: Create a file with about 10 emtpy lines and type: esc switch to normal mode gg go to the top ctrl + v, G select all lines shift + i switch to insert mode - line just type something esc this will duplicate the first line until the end of the file If you repeat the test case with no ~/.vimrc, you will notice that the lines are changed faster.
- scajanus 4y ago
  Having a ~/.vimrc, even if empty, sets 'nocompatible'.
andresgaitan 4y ago
"When I type the characters actually appear on the screen as I type them" Great quote. Perhaps one of the best arguments for using Vim

aidos 4y ago

You have to invest time in your vim setup. There’s a whole lot built in that you need to learn, but you also need to customise it to your workflow. In terms of searching through multiple files, I use Telescope with ripgrep and fzf. It’s an insanely slick workflow that allows me to jump around code faster than anything else I’ve used in my last 25 years of coding.

sibit 4y ago
This, 100%. It took me an hour the first time I configured neovim and another hour when everything broke during the v0.8 update but the ability to navigate multiple files without touching my mouse make it worth the effort. I still have to use Visual Studio for {dayjob} but the Vim binding plugin makes it (almost) tolerable. The icing on the cake is when I need to SSH into a server to debug some PHP or JS on a testing server. I know I can always open Vim for a slightly degraded (compared to my Neovim setup) but overall solid editor at any time.
- throwaway_au_1 4y ago
  Regarding the last part of your comment: you may get some value out of this plugin, https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/distant.nvim https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/distant.nvim, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVAsbpByQ3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVAsbpByQ3o. I've not used it but your use case made me wonder if there's a nice way to do it, as I regularly SSH into my NAS and RPi's, so I had a quick search.

anotherhue 4y ago

IMO it’s because you’re conflating vim with an IDE. But really it’s unix that’s the IDE. I’ll use vim to literally edit files, and then in an alternative tmux pane either run my tests or ‘entr’ my source or ‘rg’ to search or git —-bless or whatever… Editor + shell + tools is the IDE. And I like that I can swap out tools as necessary.

aidos 4y ago
And should you want to do any of that from vim, you can (and you can customise it exactly how you want).

ar_lan 4y ago

Neovim user, so a little different. I used to regularly use GoLand for ~3 years before I made the full switch over, and am a bit of an evangelist of it. I'm simply faster in it. I'd probably say the initial main attractor was modal editing (vim-mode plugins in Jetbrains are not my favorite - usually not a full implementation of the real features vim offers). * For syntax highlighting: tree-sitter is as good, if not better in my experience. * For auto-complete/navigation/etc: LSP support + a small few plugins solve this, running on par with what GoLand offers. * Search support, like the case you mentioned - I use Telescope + Ripgrep and usually my searches are roughly the same time to process as GoLand did. Are there other features that are drastically important? Because the other features Neovim offers over GoLand are: * It's way faster to load. Indexing in GoLand takes so long. LSP servers do usually take a bit of time to index but this is on the order of minutes faster than GoLand takes for the projects I have to use at work. * Significantly less memory consumption. * I can be purely keyboard driven. * Modal editing and all the niceties that come with that (note: emulators are always subpar in my experience). * Being already in the terminal is a significant advantage, especially on my laptop screen (less-so on my ultrawide). * Customizability is a lower priority, but it is still worth mentioning - there's only so much you can do to customize a Jetbrains editor. I am far more productive using it than I ever was with GoLand. I might make the exception for IntelliJ when I used to do Kotlin work - but that's the exception, not the rule. For every other language I definitely prefer Neovim. I think, like all tools, it's important to spend the time to learn it (if you desire to actually use it). Otherwise, of course vim will just look like some archaic tool that seems like it lacks all modern support.

aidos 4y ago
Treesitter is amazing. We have a bunch of sql strings in python and I was able to drop a couple of lines into my injections.scm to isolate them and get perfect sql highlighting within my python code.
- lordgroff 4y ago
  I didn't even know you could do that, this is why I come to this site.

poszlem 4y ago

This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, especially since listening to John Carmack interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4) and him saying that almost nobody uses IDEs at Meta. I think it is totally possible to be (even very) productive in VIM. I do think, though, that a person who is productive in VIM would be more productive if he used a proper IDE. This is my experience after I had been using VIM for about 10 years and switched to an IntelliJ IDE (and actually learned it) (This, of course, assumes that there is a proper IDE for your language)

ar_lan 4y ago
> that a person who is productive in VIM would be more productive if he used a proper IDE. What features does a "proper IDE" offer that, at least Neovim, does not or cannot provide?
- urthor 4y ago
  Complex IDEs offer a promise (backed by $$$). Class hierarchy visualization, database schema mappings, the latest & greatest in NLP & code completion via plugins. That "just works." Ultimately, a sufficient amount of configuration adds all those things to Vim/Emacs. Ditto VS Code on a smaller scale. The issue is how much time. I use all the obscure features of IDEs. Navigate to next issue, bookmarks, you name it, I've got it, for large codes. Implementing... all... of the features Intellij/Rider provides out of the box for JVM/React stack in Vim is... an undertaking. Don't get me wrong. I love SpaceVim, and if I worked in a domain like firmware, I'd be far more comfortable with it. Maintaining a Vim config that's integrates every tool I need for JVM and React (and machine learning, and all the other domains) is impossible.

brian_cloutier 4y ago

I've used vim for a while now and using it isn't a point of pride, it's more that whenever I try an IDE I wonder how anybody could be productive using it. I've rarely had a problem with search, I can type `:grep [some regex]` and I'm quickly shown all matches for that regex in the entire project. I admit I'm not sure how I would do a more complicated query, but this is almost always enough, what kinds of queries do you do which this doesn't cover? There's just one exception, I'm currently working in a codebase where members have very generic names, `Nonce` is a valid field name for a number of different structs, which makes search results for `Nonce` tedious to work through. For this situation I've added a keybinding which calls semgrep and lets me view all references for a specific struct's `Nonce` field. Calling out to semgrep is an instance of a more general pattern: Because vim is not integrated I lean on tools outside of vim when necessary. The `git` cli, especially once you add some aliases, gives fine access to file history and diffs. The feature I'm most jealous of is debugger integration. `gdb` and `dlv` get the job done but it's really convenient to be able step through your code with the same interface you use to write it. > There is also the point of being able to use vim bindings inside of the IDE Every vim keybinding re implementation I've tried has been missing essential features. When I'm inside an IDE I spend much of my time typing and navigating. When I'm inside vim I'm _thinking_, and the necessary changes occur about as quickly as I decide upon them.

aidos 4y ago
I don’t use debuggers myself, but I think they’re pretty well supported within vim (neovim at least) these days https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap
- Jorengarenar 4y ago
  Vimspector: https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector
kazinator 4y ago
About :grep, try integrating GNU id-utils with Vim. GNU id-utils provides a mkid command which scans a directory of files to build a binary index file called ID. The lid tool is used to query this and provides a grep-compatible mode. lid sometimes puts out things in a funny order, so I sort the output. :set grepprg=lid\ --word\ --result=grep\ '$*'\ \\\|\ sort\ -n\ -t\ :\ -k\ 2 This is basically instant even on huge file trees. Or, if you'd like :grep to use git grep: :set grepprg=git\ grep\ -n\ '$*'

scruple 4y ago

When I need an interactive debugger, I alt-tab into a JetBrains product or VS/VSCode. The only time in my career that I wasn't primarily developing inside of vim/neovim and now Emacs was when I was working on a .NET team.

ithrow 4y ago
Why did you switch from vim/neovim to emacs?
- scruple 4y ago
  I wanted magit and org-mode.

pmoriarty 4y ago

I feel pretty much the opposite. IDE's seem incredibly limiting and feature-poor compared to editors like vim and emacs, which can do just about anything. Regarding your specific examples, both vim and emacs have file histories and if your files are under version control it's easy to get diffs. Searches are super powerful in both vim and emacs, and it's easy to search across multiple files as well using various scripts/plugins. The main downside to using editors like vim and emacs is that you have to be a pretty advanced user of them and spend a lot of time configuring them to really feel their power. If you've just dipped your toes in they're not going to look very impressive and you'll likely be disappointed.. but invest the time and they're very hard if not impossible to beat.

kioleanu 4y ago
Can vim and/or emacs do refactoring? That is a feature that I use daily and couldn’t live without
- kstrauser 4y ago
  Yes. Well, Emacs definitely can, and I have no doubt Vim can with the same tooling. For example, Emacs has excellent support for LSP. If a language server exists for your favorite language, and it supports refactoring, then so does Emacs.
- aidos 4y ago
  You’ll find that most of what happens behind the scenes in vscode is available in neovim (and probably vim and emacs). The heavy lifting is done by lsps these days. One notable exception is that neovim has treesitter, so you get immediate semantic analysis on your code which allows for much more flexible refactoring. Like everything in vim, you need to spend time setting these things up to streamline your common workflows.
- Keyframe 4y ago
  Of course, both coc and lsp are your friends there. Want to change variable or function of class name or whatever? No problem. Take this piece of code and wrap it into a function, and where it once stood just place the function call? No problem. Etc.

kioleanu 4y ago

I was contemplating the same thing today as I was knee deep in refactoring a piece of code - I use IntelliJ and ideavim, which I find great because it also implements (emulates?) a small subset of vim plugins. I was able to finish the fairly complex refactoring in half an hour, without taking my hands off the keyboard by using a fairly strong combination of vim and IDE features. This is what works for me. I use an IntelliJ plugin that notifies me when I could’ve used a shortcut but I clicked with the mouse instead. It also counts the times I missed a shortcut. I keep a pretty low count but I was watching a colleague that had the same plugin and he had missed a certain shortcut 22k times. He is as productive as I am, so to each his own

kingboss 4y ago
What is with this obsession of never taking the hands of the keyboard? I've seen it so many times and it makes no sense to me. I don't find myself limited by the speed of typing but by the speed of thinking.

mikebenfield 4y ago

Although I recognize that theoretically there are features in an IDE that could be useful, every time I've tried to use one I find it intrusive and slow and frustrating and confusing. I inevitably close it in a rage within 15 minutes because of some design decision that I find infuriatingly stupid. neovim plus a couple extensions plus some Unix command line tools are just so simple and convenient.

dmitriid 4y ago
Why did you spend time to figure out and set up vim, tools, and extensions, but only spend 15 minutes with an IDE? vim's "design decision" to have extensions and external tools that you need to manually string together somehow is just as infuriating.

keithnz 4y ago

IdeaVim in the jetbrains products is really good I find. You get best of both worlds. I used to customize vim a lot, but I pretty much just use it as is now as a casual editor for editing files, especially for big files. The editor is very snappy and quick to load compared to IDEs, but on a well spec'd computer you aren't really going to notice too much (depending on the IDE)

rascul 4y ago

> It's alway pretty fascinating to me that people can actually be productive without an IDE. I was coding for years before I discovered that IDEs exist. Never used one much until I started using VS Code a few years ago (if you call that an IDE, some people do and some don't).

glouwbug 4y ago

vim, grep, and find. git-grep turns your codebase into a O(logn) database

hot_gril 4y ago

There's a steep learning curve, and it's not necessary. I mainly use Vim, but it wouldn't be a big deal if I didn't. Reasons for me: - It's a lot more laptop-friendly not having to deal with a mouse and complex GUI. I even gave up my desk at work and just sit and code in random places. - On my desk at home, it's a bit faster for me than an IDE. But that depends. - Seems like IDE users are constantly switching tools, especially when changing jobs. Even at my current 4-year job, my teammates have all changed between 3 different IDEs and had to screw around with remote access problems for each. I've used Vim everywhere since college.

smeeth 4y ago

Its more of a focus thing for me. Its easier to get into the zone when I'm in a terminal with no mouse and all the GUI noise stripped away. I'm sure I'm missing out on quality of life enhancements and whatnot, but really all of those are lower on my hierarchy of needs than staying on task.

asciimov 4y ago

From my perspective, vim is just a tool that I picked up in college, back in the bad old days (early 00's) where good IDE's were paid and anything free was largely terrible. Sure IDE's are great, I love stepping through code, it really helps when you're in deep and are having problems reasoning about the state of your program. That said, every shop I've worked in used a different IDE. Possibly one picked out by some long gone coder who thought that their choice was the best. Finally not being saddled to any one IDE lets me use the any other tool to get a job done.

jstimpfle 4y ago
I suppose I agree with this, I try not to obsess over the tools too much. It makes sense to have a standard IDE and standard tools in a company. However there's always a possibility to improve. One can suggest new tools to a small circle of coworkers, or just start trying out new tools on one's own. In one workplace that has a huge Windows codebase I compile and debug from within Visual Studio, and edit either in Visual Studio or sometimes vim. When I get the chance to do explorative work on a rather standalone project I gravitate towards vim, even to printf debugging, even though Visual Studio is available. I don't know why this is, old habits, or is it genuinely more economic on some axis - for new projects at least?

cjvirtucio 4y ago

the main thing that allows me to be productive with "only" vim is, funnily enough, things outside vim: bash knowledge. search, for instance, I can usually do in flexible ways with a pipeline of commands.