4 ms·

I used to use Vim, and then I got a job after college working with .NET (this was in 2003). Since then I've used Visual Studio as my primary IDE. Its features (

I used to use Vim, and then I got a job after college working with .NET (this was in 2003). Since then I've used Visual Studio as my primary IDE. Its features (or that of Eclipse) seem to (pardon the pun) eclipse the crap out of Vim. The contextual information you get in VS by hovering your mouse on any variable, the built-in debugging, etc. Studio isn't a just text editor, it actually understands the semantics of your programming language, it helps you write better code faster.

rodh257 15y ago
You can get VsVim to use vim like editing inside of Visual Studio, which may give you the best of both worlds?
- Roboprog 15y ago
  For Java, NetBeans + vim plugin does just that. Major win. Same editor (almost, plain old vi) in impoverished production environments, full vim under cygwin for quick patches, and the same keystrokes in my IDE with all the other goodies for long term projects.
drhowarddrfine 15y ago
You need all that to figure out the 20K+ functions/libraries/system calls to get anything to work. If you need all that, use emacs.
anykey 15y ago
And that is why VisualStudio is considered an IDE rather than an editor. As with the rest of the *nix toolkit, the philosophy with Vi(m) is to do one simple thing (editing) and do it really really well, for better or worse. I think this exemplifies this: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/tips.html#shell-window http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/tips.html#shell-window
- noveltyaccount 15y ago
  I fundamentally agree that doing less and doing it well is a virtue in software, but people don't "just" "edit text." When I edit text I'm either writing a document/web page (where I need to format it in addition to editing the text), or writing code (where I need to debug and test it). I still use Vim when I ssh into my firm's Linux server and I'm so glad that it works--so well--over a remote session. But for actually writing a program, I'm happy to have a proper IDE.

rodh257 15y ago

You can get VsVim to use vim like editing inside of Visual Studio, which may give you the best of both worlds?

Roboprog 15y ago
For Java, NetBeans + vim plugin does just that. Major win. Same editor (almost, plain old vi) in impoverished production environments, full vim under cygwin for quick patches, and the same keystrokes in my IDE with all the other goodies for long term projects.

drhowarddrfine 15y ago

You need all that to figure out the 20K+ functions/libraries/system calls to get anything to work. If you need all that, use emacs.

anykey 15y ago

And that is why VisualStudio is considered an IDE rather than an editor. As with the rest of the *nix toolkit, the philosophy with Vi(m) is to do one simple thing (editing) and do it really really well, for better or worse. I think this exemplifies this: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/tips.html#shell-window http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/tips.html#shell-window

noveltyaccount 15y ago
I fundamentally agree that doing less and doing it well is a virtue in software, but people don't "just" "edit text." When I edit text I'm either writing a document/web page (where I need to format it in addition to editing the text), or writing code (where I need to debug and test it). I still use Vim when I ssh into my firm's Linux server and I'm so glad that it works--so well--over a remote session. But for actually writing a program, I'm happy to have a proper IDE.