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I've tried to migrate to something more lightweight like (neo)?vim, Helix, emacs; but regardless of how good their syntax awareness/LSP support is, it's always

I've tried to migrate to something more lightweight like (neo)?vim, Helix, emacs; but regardless of how good their syntax awareness/LSP support is, it's always inferior to JetBrains IDEs. Simple example: (any language, e.g. Rust) rename a function across multiple files and undo it. Let me know how you'd do it in your editor of choice.

nx7487 4y ago
sed -i "s/function_name/function_name2/g" $FILES && git restore $FILES Edit: Not claiming this is better, just saying what I get by with. I have never used an IDE in my career so far, or any autocomplete or code modification features.
- geysersam 4y ago
  Sure, but if function_name is a subword of another_function_name, this would break things :/
- eitland 4y ago
  It cannot differentiate between a field in a class and a variable in a method, or even a word in a comment, can it?
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    add the c and it will prompt so you can make the determination yourself.
    - monkpit 4y ago
      So, no
      - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        People get so hung up on this, but it's literally the shallowest sort of refactoring. If you're choosing your tools strictly for this you're doing yourself a disservice.
        eitland 4y ago
        It is also the simplest refactoring, and my point is no command line tricks I have can seen can even reliably do this. Refactoring support in modern IDEs goes far beyond renaming public fields and methods.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        I've had this exact conversation so many times over the years. In truth, you just don't know the tools that well. And that's ok, but as someone who does and regularly does these things in both IDE's and in vim, you're wrong. But I'm not going to bother trying to convince you, the same way I'm not going to try and convince you that my gf of 11 years is pretty awesome. I don't need you to get better to know that you're wrong.
        eitland 4y ago
        Good for you. 17 years since I met my gf here. And I started on vim a long time before IntelliJ :-)
  - casey2 4y ago
    Sam could do all that since the 80s. So ~40 years.
  - ajuc 4y ago
    It can with a proper regex. Mostly. Depending on the language, your patience, and the amount of false positives you are comfortable with. I did sth like that (I had bash scripts for common programming "refactorings" and "queries" like "print all classes and methods where this variable is used"). I couldn't use a modern IDE cause we were programming on a legacy linux server through ssh for licencing reasons. And the (C++) code was written by a guy that learnt C++ and OOP on the job and it showed. Class hierarchies were sometimes 8 levels deep and class variables were reused for different purposes to "save effort on serializing them" :) So if the user interactions were in the same order and with the same text prompts - a class would inherit them and add some new ones. Even if the old class was just accidentally asking the user similar questions :) So OR_PalNr could mean shelf number in base class and Printer number in descendant, because both times the user was asked to "scan the barcode", while the callstack was a mix of methods from both classes :) Fun times. BTW nowadays I mostly work with IntelliJ, but sometimes a script is still the best way to understand the code. For example grepping the git blame output is often very useful. It's never 100% reliable, but it's often good enough.
    - eitland 4y ago
      First: > BTW nowadays I mostly work with IntelliJ, but sometimes a script is still the best way to understand the code. For example grepping the git blame output is often very useful. It's never 100% reliable, but it's often good enough. I see we are on the same page : ) > It can with a proper regex. Mostly. Depending on the language, your patience, and the amount of false positives you are comfortable with. For everyone else: in any of the three big Java IDEs, and in a number of other cases, you don't need much patience or tolerance for false positives, at least if your code isn't too unreasonable (with any sufficiently expressive language you can of course always fool it by somehow accessing things dynamically). > I did sth like that (I had bash scripts for common programming "refactorings" and "queries" like "print all classes and methods where this variable is used"). I couldn't use a modern IDE cause we were programming on a legacy linux server through ssh for licencing reasons. This is awesome!
- knighthack 4y ago
  Why would you want to avoid autocomplete? And what language do you code in?
mikojan 4y ago
Go, command line: $ gorename -from '"my-package".myFunc' -to myRenamedFunc
- tommica 4y ago
  That's amazing!
- nomel 4y ago
  I would say that’s a fairly trivial example. How about renaming a method? Or, moving a class to a different file?
  - 8ytecoder 4y ago
    Or reordering parameters.
    - likely_harrison 4y ago
      gofmt can do that! What I’m still looking for is an easy way to bubble up go contexts, adding as first pagans. Perhaps IntelliJ is useful here?
    - wruza 4y ago
      All this fiddling ends when you get a team and a vcs.
askvictor 4y ago
Having recently moved from IntelliJ to VS Code, I still miss a few things in the IntelliJ platform (it's overall layout is cleaner, important things are easy to get to), but VSCode has (last I checked) far superior remote debugging support, and is otherwise similar enough once you get past the muscle-memory.
- fredophile 4y ago
  As someone who uses visual studio almost every day I'd say it isn't complete on its own. I can't navigate around a vanilla install that doesn't have visual assist installed as well anymore. If you want a cheaper alternative, workspace whiz is also decent.
- theshadowmonkey 4y ago
  Big thing I miss working on VS code and IntelliJ interchangeably. Local history of your changes. Huge differentiator while working on a lot of changes.
jansan 4y ago
I have been using IntelliJ IDEs since the early 2000s. Currently I am using WebStorm's (IntelliJ's small JS brother), and the local history feature in combination with the outstanding diff view are just one reason why I could not work without it.
- theshadowmonkey 4y ago
  Local history is a game changer. And live templates. The one I use is using a template to automatically put in console log with the context of where(line num and function name) when I type a shortcut like cl
quanticle 4y ago
JetBrains' IDEs are great for the languages which they explicitly support, but are often hilariously bad for the languages that are supported with plugins or extensions. For example, the Clojure plugin for IntelliJ, Cursive, doesn't have great macro support, and, one day just stopped being able to run unit tests. Or rather, it'd pretend to run the tests, give a nice green bar, green checkmark and everything, but the tests wouldn't actually have been run. I found this behavior the hard way, when I almost committed a bug. I'd run the test suite, saw that it was green, and thought that the code I'd written had passed all of the checks. It was only during some happenstance manual testing that I noticed "impossible" behavior (i.e. the code behaving in a way that I'd explicitly checked for in tests). Immediately suspicious, I reran all the tests from a REPL on the command line, and saw a whole bunch of failures that Cursive hadn't reported. Since then, I've been using CIDER on emacs to do Clojure development, and I haven't had any issues.
- ivanb 4y ago
  Cursive is manufactured by Ideogram Limited, not JetBrains.
stackbutterflow 4y ago
That's the go-to example whenever IDEs are discussed on HN but I...almost never do that? I don't think I can count on two hands the number of times I have to do that in a year. As for undoing it I don't think I've ever done it at all. Anyway it doesn't matter because vim + CoC can do it. And for undoing it I guess I simply rename it back to the original name. Actually I just tried and yeah, it works. One of these day I'd like to sit with a JetBrains user and see how they work. I'm sure it's a great IDE but so far I haven't heard about anything life changing.
- mehphp 4y ago
  This has been my take as well. I can drill-down into third-party packages, rename stuff across files, and use the debugger. I'm not saying JetBrains isn't fantastic, their products certainly are, but the examples given as to why I should switch are less than convincing. Just use whatever works for you. It's similar to the flak I get for using an iPhone instead of Android. "You can't customize it!"... I don't want to.. I just want it to make phone calls and browse the web.
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  When I used IntelliJ, for the languages it understood best (then Java and Kotlin), it felt very little like editing text. The sense was much more like interacting directly with an AST. I rarely had to use standard 'text' editing features (oriented around word/sentence/para entities). This was an emergent affordance from all the many language-oriented facilities (all available via keyboard shortcuts) offered, rather than one specific feature. I actually don't use IntelliJ now for reasons not germane here. I'm on neovim, mostly with Rust and javascript/typescript). This is great in many ways but the ergonomics of editing, even with LSP integration, are much more like editing text, which is more distant from my mental model of the code.
- worldsavior 4y ago
  Or you don't see the potential, or you're not comfortable, or you don't have energy for this. If you did get the hang of it (vim for example), you would probably use it in some kind of way.
kryptn 4y ago
Rust in vscode with rust-analyzer: Select the symbol, cmd+shift+p to get the command palette, type rename and select 'rename symbol'. Or right click and pick rename symbol. You can undo/redo with cmd+z or cmd+shift+z. replace cmd with ctrl on linux or windows.
- gamjQZnHT53AMa 4y ago
  F2 is also the shortcut in vscode
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
patrick451 4y ago
First, I almost never do this, so whether I can or not isn't really a selling point. That said, emacs+lsp-mode handles this just fine, at least for c++.
sad-vscode-user 4y ago
Switched this year to VSCode and the quality of most LSPs for VSCode is surprisingly good. Regarding your example: Just rename again. I can tell countless examples of Webstorm failing hard compared to VSCode. So, from the technical point of view I would say VSCode is equally good. What I miss most is the UX. Once you get used to the Jetbrains IDEs, their usability is really awesome.
abareplace 4y ago
* enter the current and the new names, * turn on the Match whole word and Match case modes, * review the found occurrences; * press the Replace button. https://www.abareplace.com/blog/blog_rename_method/ https://www.abareplace.com/blog/blog_rename_method/ Disclaimer: I wrote this program.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
yeah, I'm an emacs person and I still use it for a lot of things, but I also am a proud paying customer of the entire Idea suite; I use PyCharm, RubyMine, IntelliJ and DataGrip on a regular basis. And worth every penny, for me.

nx7487 4y ago

sed -i "s/function_name/function_name2/g" $FILES && git restore $FILES Edit: Not claiming this is better, just saying what I get by with. I have never used an IDE in my career so far, or any autocomplete or code modification features.

geysersam 4y ago
Sure, but if function_name is a subword of another_function_name, this would break things :/
eitland 4y ago
It cannot differentiate between a field in a class and a variable in a method, or even a word in a comment, can it?
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  add the c and it will prompt so you can make the determination yourself.
  - monkpit 4y ago
    So, no
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      People get so hung up on this, but it's literally the shallowest sort of refactoring. If you're choosing your tools strictly for this you're doing yourself a disservice.
      - eitland 4y ago
        It is also the simplest refactoring, and my point is no command line tricks I have can seen can even reliably do this. Refactoring support in modern IDEs goes far beyond renaming public fields and methods.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        I've had this exact conversation so many times over the years. In truth, you just don't know the tools that well. And that's ok, but as someone who does and regularly does these things in both IDE's and in vim, you're wrong. But I'm not going to bother trying to convince you, the same way I'm not going to try and convince you that my gf of 11 years is pretty awesome. I don't need you to get better to know that you're wrong.
        eitland 4y ago
        Good for you. 17 years since I met my gf here. And I started on vim a long time before IntelliJ :-)
- casey2 4y ago
  Sam could do all that since the 80s. So ~40 years.
- ajuc 4y ago
  It can with a proper regex. Mostly. Depending on the language, your patience, and the amount of false positives you are comfortable with. I did sth like that (I had bash scripts for common programming "refactorings" and "queries" like "print all classes and methods where this variable is used"). I couldn't use a modern IDE cause we were programming on a legacy linux server through ssh for licencing reasons. And the (C++) code was written by a guy that learnt C++ and OOP on the job and it showed. Class hierarchies were sometimes 8 levels deep and class variables were reused for different purposes to "save effort on serializing them" :) So if the user interactions were in the same order and with the same text prompts - a class would inherit them and add some new ones. Even if the old class was just accidentally asking the user similar questions :) So OR_PalNr could mean shelf number in base class and Printer number in descendant, because both times the user was asked to "scan the barcode", while the callstack was a mix of methods from both classes :) Fun times. BTW nowadays I mostly work with IntelliJ, but sometimes a script is still the best way to understand the code. For example grepping the git blame output is often very useful. It's never 100% reliable, but it's often good enough.
  - eitland 4y ago
    First: > BTW nowadays I mostly work with IntelliJ, but sometimes a script is still the best way to understand the code. For example grepping the git blame output is often very useful. It's never 100% reliable, but it's often good enough. I see we are on the same page : ) > It can with a proper regex. Mostly. Depending on the language, your patience, and the amount of false positives you are comfortable with. For everyone else: in any of the three big Java IDEs, and in a number of other cases, you don't need much patience or tolerance for false positives, at least if your code isn't too unreasonable (with any sufficiently expressive language you can of course always fool it by somehow accessing things dynamically). > I did sth like that (I had bash scripts for common programming "refactorings" and "queries" like "print all classes and methods where this variable is used"). I couldn't use a modern IDE cause we were programming on a legacy linux server through ssh for licencing reasons. This is awesome!
knighthack 4y ago
Why would you want to avoid autocomplete? And what language do you code in?

mikojan 4y ago

Go, command line: $ gorename -from '"my-package".myFunc' -to myRenamedFunc

tommica 4y ago
That's amazing!
nomel 4y ago
I would say that’s a fairly trivial example. How about renaming a method? Or, moving a class to a different file?
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  Or reordering parameters.
  - likely_harrison 4y ago
    gofmt can do that! What I’m still looking for is an easy way to bubble up go contexts, adding as first pagans. Perhaps IntelliJ is useful here?
  - wruza 4y ago
    All this fiddling ends when you get a team and a vcs.

askvictor 4y ago

Having recently moved from IntelliJ to VS Code, I still miss a few things in the IntelliJ platform (it's overall layout is cleaner, important things are easy to get to), but VSCode has (last I checked) far superior remote debugging support, and is otherwise similar enough once you get past the muscle-memory.

fredophile 4y ago
As someone who uses visual studio almost every day I'd say it isn't complete on its own. I can't navigate around a vanilla install that doesn't have visual assist installed as well anymore. If you want a cheaper alternative, workspace whiz is also decent.
theshadowmonkey 4y ago
Big thing I miss working on VS code and IntelliJ interchangeably. Local history of your changes. Huge differentiator while working on a lot of changes.

jansan 4y ago

I have been using IntelliJ IDEs since the early 2000s. Currently I am using WebStorm's (IntelliJ's small JS brother), and the local history feature in combination with the outstanding diff view are just one reason why I could not work without it.

theshadowmonkey 4y ago
Local history is a game changer. And live templates. The one I use is using a template to automatically put in console log with the context of where(line num and function name) when I type a shortcut like cl

quanticle 4y ago

JetBrains' IDEs are great for the languages which they explicitly support, but are often hilariously bad for the languages that are supported with plugins or extensions. For example, the Clojure plugin for IntelliJ, Cursive, doesn't have great macro support, and, one day just stopped being able to run unit tests. Or rather, it'd pretend to run the tests, give a nice green bar, green checkmark and everything, but the tests wouldn't actually have been run. I found this behavior the hard way, when I almost committed a bug. I'd run the test suite, saw that it was green, and thought that the code I'd written had passed all of the checks. It was only during some happenstance manual testing that I noticed "impossible" behavior (i.e. the code behaving in a way that I'd explicitly checked for in tests). Immediately suspicious, I reran all the tests from a REPL on the command line, and saw a whole bunch of failures that Cursive hadn't reported. Since then, I've been using CIDER on emacs to do Clojure development, and I haven't had any issues.

ivanb 4y ago
Cursive is manufactured by Ideogram Limited, not JetBrains.

stackbutterflow 4y ago

That's the go-to example whenever IDEs are discussed on HN but I...almost never do that? I don't think I can count on two hands the number of times I have to do that in a year. As for undoing it I don't think I've ever done it at all. Anyway it doesn't matter because vim + CoC can do it. And for undoing it I guess I simply rename it back to the original name. Actually I just tried and yeah, it works. One of these day I'd like to sit with a JetBrains user and see how they work. I'm sure it's a great IDE but so far I haven't heard about anything life changing.

mehphp 4y ago
This has been my take as well. I can drill-down into third-party packages, rename stuff across files, and use the debugger. I'm not saying JetBrains isn't fantastic, their products certainly are, but the examples given as to why I should switch are less than convincing. Just use whatever works for you. It's similar to the flak I get for using an iPhone instead of Android. "You can't customize it!"... I don't want to.. I just want it to make phone calls and browse the web.
aussiesnack 4y ago
When I used IntelliJ, for the languages it understood best (then Java and Kotlin), it felt very little like editing text. The sense was much more like interacting directly with an AST. I rarely had to use standard 'text' editing features (oriented around word/sentence/para entities). This was an emergent affordance from all the many language-oriented facilities (all available via keyboard shortcuts) offered, rather than one specific feature. I actually don't use IntelliJ now for reasons not germane here. I'm on neovim, mostly with Rust and javascript/typescript). This is great in many ways but the ergonomics of editing, even with LSP integration, are much more like editing text, which is more distant from my mental model of the code.
worldsavior 4y ago
Or you don't see the potential, or you're not comfortable, or you don't have energy for this. If you did get the hang of it (vim for example), you would probably use it in some kind of way.

kryptn 4y ago

Rust in vscode with rust-analyzer: Select the symbol, cmd+shift+p to get the command palette, type rename and select 'rename symbol'. Or right click and pick rename symbol. You can undo/redo with cmd+z or cmd+shift+z. replace cmd with ctrl on linux or windows.

gamjQZnHT53AMa 4y ago
F2 is also the shortcut in vscode

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

patrick451 4y ago

First, I almost never do this, so whether I can or not isn't really a selling point. That said, emacs+lsp-mode handles this just fine, at least for c++.

sad-vscode-user 4y ago

Switched this year to VSCode and the quality of most LSPs for VSCode is surprisingly good. Regarding your example: Just rename again. I can tell countless examples of Webstorm failing hard compared to VSCode. So, from the technical point of view I would say VSCode is equally good. What I miss most is the UX. Once you get used to the Jetbrains IDEs, their usability is really awesome.

abareplace 4y ago

* enter the current and the new names, * turn on the Match whole word and Match case modes, * review the found occurrences; * press the Replace button. https://www.abareplace.com/blog/blog_rename_method/ https://www.abareplace.com/blog/blog_rename_method/ Disclaimer: I wrote this program.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

yeah, I'm an emacs person and I still use it for a lot of things, but I also am a proud paying customer of the entire Idea suite; I use PyCharm, RubyMine, IntelliJ and DataGrip on a regular basis. And worth every penny, for me.