5 ms·

I kind of settled on vim as console editor in Linux but it will never replace good ide for me, and modern ides are getting/having vim mode for navigation, makin

by galkk 3y ago

I kind of settled on vim as console editor in Linux but it will never replace good ide for me, and modern ides are getting/having vim mode for navigation, making then even more compelling. * Do you want autodetect indent and tab rule in file? Install plugin. * Do you want to automatically insert matching closing parenthesis - rebind keys (half baked solution) or plugin. * Vertical scrollbar? Plugin * Autocomplete code using lsp? Dance with plugins or copy paste literal screens of configs for nvim * Want nice looking theme? Plugin! (Gruvbox in my case) * Install and manage plugins? 3rd party Plugin for that too, with init code that will clone it itself from GitHub * Wrap long lines by whole words if possible? No default setting, I guess I need to search for plugin for that too. List goes on and on, and it is just I’m looking at my vimrc and recalling why I added or another thing. And there are many things which I decided to just to not care about, because it requires too much time to get it work Parent mentioned refactorings, but trust me, no matter what typing/navigating speed is, the standard refactorings in modern ides (that I bet cover most of typical refactoring work) will work faster and more correctly than manually doing the same. Even basic things like projectwise method rename or extracting something to parameter. Almost every quality of life improvement that is standard in modern ides require tinkering with vim.

wruza 3y ago
That’s mostly true, but then one day you want to use an external filter, or a custom set of snippets that doesn’t suck at editing them, or make the next line align correctly after “(“ and there’s no plugin for that in your ide. And, more importantly, it’s a pita to create and publish one. It’s not better or worse, some people like off the shelf availability, some like local fine tuning. Would be nice to have a full union, but ides suck at local customization that wasn’t trivial or planned in advance. Added: I hate both worlds now. Where’s an editor that is full of modern features and at the same time easily programmable?
- pcblues 3y ago
  The last great effort with resources, experts, etc. was VSCode. If they can't nail it, can it be done?
  - galkk 3y ago
    VSCode seem to have a lot of things done very right, but i don’t want to focus too much on it in vim topic.
- drekipus 3y ago
  Emacs
  - kagevf 3y ago
    v29 looks promising :)
- dundarious 3y ago
  Maybe 10x, but I’m not willing to switch yet myself, I need C-[ for Esc. https://10xeditor.com/ https://10xeditor.com/
- galkk 3y ago
  Given amount of the extensions that vscode has I feel that local customization is solved problem for it. But it is rather exception
  - whatisyour 3y ago
    VSCode plugins still take a massive effort to write in comparison to vim/neovim where you could basically do everything in your vimrc.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > Added: I hate both worlds now. Where’s an editor that is full of modern features and at the same time easily programmable? An IDE plugin for Vim rather than a Vim plugin for IDEs?
- alwillis 3y ago
  > Added: I hate both worlds now. Where’s an editor that is full of modern features and at the same time easily programmable? What about an editor with - LSP and treesitter support built-in - Scriptable with Lua, a common and well-supported embedded language - Regular and remote plugins can be written in NodeJS, Python and Ruby for starters - Built-in terminal emulator - Uses XDG directory layout - Plugins run as separate processes - API for accessing core editor features - UI and core editor are decoupled; all UIs are plugins - Multiple UI clients can connect to the same editor server This and a lot more is on the Neovim page [1]. [1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html#nvim-features https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html#nvim-features
  - galkk 3y ago
    nvim is in my setup scripts with dotfiles and is picking up my vim config per my init.vim. But still - look about actual setting up it [1], [2], where [1] stragight says "if you need autocomplete, you need plugin for that". I obviously can do it, but I just don't want to... Batteries should be included in $CURRENT_YEAR. It is probably missed, but I use vim everyday, as text editor for many years. My .vimrc on github is 3 years old, and only because I moved it there from bitbucket and didn't bothered to preserve history. I'm not against it. It was that original comment that I answered, was saying that vim is effective/better for IDE specific tasks (e.g. large refactorings, that inititial comment that I've replied), and after many years of using vim I strongly believe is rather ignorant and shows not understanding of power and features of modern IDEs. [1]: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig [2]: https://alpha2phi.medium.com/neovim-for-beginners-lsp-part-1-b3a17ddbe611 https://alpha2phi.medium.com/neovim-for-beginners-lsp-part-1...
wyclif 3y ago
Guilty as charged but complaints about "tinkering with Vim" kind of miss the point to me. Tinkering isn't a bug, it's a feature. Vim was designed in the UNIX philosophy of small tools that allow you to modify them to your needs. Also, modern IDE layers for Neovim such as LunarVim or AstroVim make managing plugins trivial.
- galkk 3y ago
  Nothing about vim is “small tool”. Maybe it was 40 years ago, but now it feels much more bloated and with too much tech debt accumulated during the years.
  - taejavu 3y ago
    In what way is it bloated? IIRC, the executable is less than 2MB, and without plugins it uses about that much memory too.
    - StrangeATractor 3y ago
      GP mixed up vim with emacs.
    - galkk 3y ago
      You forgot vim-runtime that is another 35mb and hard dependency on Debian. But I was rather saying that if a program has 600 pages dense manual (vimbook) it is certainly far from Unix philosophy of small utility doing one thing. Damn, it has built in file explorer and remote editor (netrw).
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        It strikes me that that’s roughly 0.05% of the RAM on my desktop.
      - arp242 3y ago
        You can install vim-tiny on Debian, which I believe doesn't install the runtime files. Size is not really a good indication of "bloat" IMO. There are 683 syntax highlight files, 7.8M in total, but you don't load most of that and it's just "idle" bytes on disk. Same for indent files, ftplugins, etc. You could also save ~5M by not shipping translations, but is that "bloat"? It's useful these things are shipped, and in the scenarios where you care about 35M of diskspace you probably don't want a full Vim anyway (and you can use vim-tiny).
whatisyour 3y ago
Vim (Or rather neovim) now is that tool that grows with you as you age. So, as you mentioned, even I have small small things I've added and removed from my vim/neovim setup over the years as I have changed with the code. For me personally, the benefits are worth it, because the neovim approach really works well with my way of working with editors. And the "personally" part is really important. In my early years I have used IDEs and I was never really interested in using Vim in the first place. (I thought it was not very nice looking when I first looked at the empty screen). I only started using it because I found other IDEs (CLion, Visual Studio) and so on not very comfortable. Even now, I have tried quite hard to use VSCode due to its support for remote development which I really like as a feature. However, I keep coming back to Vim it seems. So, for me, vim is an appropriate tool, but it might not be for you, because we might be thinking about text editing in fundamentally different ways.
- galkk 3y ago
  I don't feel that we thinking about it differntly. It is that editing source code is much more than just editing text. And vim severely lacking as an IDE. We don't need to associate motion style navigating and separation of command and insertion modes as something very vim specific. It is that vim is installed on every machine that I work on in like 99% of cases, and it made sense to me to learn something that is always available. But the shortcomings are very clear. I can give an analogy of gdb. I feel that anyone who says that text mode gdb is anywhere near convenience that you get using modern IDE is suffering from stockholm syndrome. Yes, obviously it is more powerful in some circumstances, but for day to day use it is just plain inconvenient. And that's why I said in my first post - I settle on vim as text editor, but I gave up trying to set it as an IDE, so I will never code in it, unless I'm forced to (who knows, weird job that requires vim use etc). Life is too short for that amount of tinkering.
  - Asooka 3y ago
    Text mode GDB is very clunky, but it is better than any frontend I have tried. Whatever pain points it has, I can mostly work around with scripts, which isn't possible with a GUI. The worst part is that it's awfully slow for programs with a plugin architecture. If I set a pending breakpoint before starting the program, I can wait ten minutes until all plugins are loaded. I really wish I could tell it to preload some debug information at the start.
lelanthran 3y ago
> * Wrap long lines by whole words if possible? No default setting, I guess I need to search for plugin for that too. Shift-V:!fmt Works on all blocks, not only lines.
- galkk 3y ago
  I didn't mean formatting, but just "wrap lines in editor". So long lines always fit screen, without actually inserting line separators. I was speaking about set wrap but because I turn on display invisible symbols, set linebreak doesn't work. Why? I don't know. Somehow IDEs can do that without issues, but the technology isn't there yet for vim, seems like.
kazinator 3y ago
> Do you want autodetect indent and tab rule in file? Install plugin. https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/c-snippets/tree/autotab.c https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/c-snippets/tree/autotab.c
- roryrjb 3y ago
  Nice, it works well!
lawn 3y ago
Some see having to install and configure a plugin as a bug, but I see it as a feature. You can also get modern IDE features such as LSP supported renames in Vim, so it's not an either fast typing or good refactoring support, you can get both.
erfgh 3y ago
I don't see any of those features as improvements. Even when I had to use an IDE (java...) I never enabled any of that.
drbaba 3y ago
Not to detract from your general point - I definitely see the value in using an IDE with a Vim plugin, and often do so myself. > Vertical scrollbar? Plugin If you want scrollbars, the right solution is IMO to use a GUI Vim. I often use MacVim which is great, GVim is the obvious alternative on Linux/Windows, and NeoVim has lots of options (including, arguably, VSCode-NeoVim which is also great). With MacVim, I can pop around randomly in a terminal and open Vim instances that run in the terminal as usual - and if I start editing something for long, I can type :gui to pop up an actual MacVim GUI window. I believe the same works in GVim. > * Autocomplete code using lsp? Dance with plugins or copy paste literal screens of configs for nvim I was annoyed by this as well. I then discovered that ALE (the venerable pre-LSP plugin for async linting) now has full LSP support, and it all “just works”. Doesn’t require NeoVim either. Just install the ALE plugin and put LSP servers in $PATH. ALE will find and use them. (By default, it uses standard Vim bindings like C-x C-o for completion, but you can change it.) > * Want nice looking theme? Plugin! (Gruvbox in my case) Vim 9.x (not NeoVim) has added a built-in Gruvbox theme named “retrobox” (both light and dark variants based on your background setting). If you don’t have it yet, you can get it as a plugin from here until your Vim updates: https://github.com/vim/colorschemes https://github.com/vim/colorschemes > * Wrap long lines by whole words if possible? No default setting, I guess I need to search for plugin for that too. There are built-in settings for this, but yeah it requires some initial fiddling to get it nice. (After that initial fiddling, I’ve been annoyed by how word wrap works in any other editor.)

by galkk 3y ago

wruza 3y ago

That’s mostly true, but then one day you want to use an external filter, or a custom set of snippets that doesn’t suck at editing them, or make the next line align correctly after “(“ and there’s no plugin for that in your ide. And, more importantly, it’s a pita to create and publish one. It’s not better or worse, some people like off the shelf availability, some like local fine tuning. Would be nice to have a full union, but ides suck at local customization that wasn’t trivial or planned in advance. Added: I hate both worlds now. Where’s an editor that is full of modern features and at the same time easily programmable?

pcblues 3y ago
The last great effort with resources, experts, etc. was VSCode. If they can't nail it, can it be done?
- galkk 3y ago
  VSCode seem to have a lot of things done very right, but i don’t want to focus too much on it in vim topic.
drekipus 3y ago
Emacs
- kagevf 3y ago
  v29 looks promising :)
dundarious 3y ago
Maybe 10x, but I’m not willing to switch yet myself, I need C-[ for Esc. https://10xeditor.com/ https://10xeditor.com/
galkk 3y ago
Given amount of the extensions that vscode has I feel that local customization is solved problem for it. But it is rather exception
- whatisyour 3y ago
  VSCode plugins still take a massive effort to write in comparison to vim/neovim where you could basically do everything in your vimrc.
lelanthran 3y ago
> Added: I hate both worlds now. Where’s an editor that is full of modern features and at the same time easily programmable? An IDE plugin for Vim rather than a Vim plugin for IDEs?
alwillis 3y ago
> Added: I hate both worlds now. Where’s an editor that is full of modern features and at the same time easily programmable? What about an editor with - LSP and treesitter support built-in - Scriptable with Lua, a common and well-supported embedded language - Regular and remote plugins can be written in NodeJS, Python and Ruby for starters - Built-in terminal emulator - Uses XDG directory layout - Plugins run as separate processes - API for accessing core editor features - UI and core editor are decoupled; all UIs are plugins - Multiple UI clients can connect to the same editor server This and a lot more is on the Neovim page [1]. [1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html#nvim-features https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html#nvim-features
- galkk 3y ago
  nvim is in my setup scripts with dotfiles and is picking up my vim config per my init.vim. But still - look about actual setting up it [1], [2], where [1] stragight says "if you need autocomplete, you need plugin for that". I obviously can do it, but I just don't want to... Batteries should be included in $CURRENT_YEAR. It is probably missed, but I use vim everyday, as text editor for many years. My .vimrc on github is 3 years old, and only because I moved it there from bitbucket and didn't bothered to preserve history. I'm not against it. It was that original comment that I answered, was saying that vim is effective/better for IDE specific tasks (e.g. large refactorings, that inititial comment that I've replied), and after many years of using vim I strongly believe is rather ignorant and shows not understanding of power and features of modern IDEs. [1]: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig [2]: https://alpha2phi.medium.com/neovim-for-beginners-lsp-part-1-b3a17ddbe611 https://alpha2phi.medium.com/neovim-for-beginners-lsp-part-1...

wyclif 3y ago

Guilty as charged but complaints about "tinkering with Vim" kind of miss the point to me. Tinkering isn't a bug, it's a feature. Vim was designed in the UNIX philosophy of small tools that allow you to modify them to your needs. Also, modern IDE layers for Neovim such as LunarVim or AstroVim make managing plugins trivial.

galkk 3y ago
Nothing about vim is “small tool”. Maybe it was 40 years ago, but now it feels much more bloated and with too much tech debt accumulated during the years.
- taejavu 3y ago
  In what way is it bloated? IIRC, the executable is less than 2MB, and without plugins it uses about that much memory too.
  - StrangeATractor 3y ago
    GP mixed up vim with emacs.
  - galkk 3y ago
    You forgot vim-runtime that is another 35mb and hard dependency on Debian. But I was rather saying that if a program has 600 pages dense manual (vimbook) it is certainly far from Unix philosophy of small utility doing one thing. Damn, it has built in file explorer and remote editor (netrw).
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      It strikes me that that’s roughly 0.05% of the RAM on my desktop.
    - arp242 3y ago
      You can install vim-tiny on Debian, which I believe doesn't install the runtime files. Size is not really a good indication of "bloat" IMO. There are 683 syntax highlight files, 7.8M in total, but you don't load most of that and it's just "idle" bytes on disk. Same for indent files, ftplugins, etc. You could also save ~5M by not shipping translations, but is that "bloat"? It's useful these things are shipped, and in the scenarios where you care about 35M of diskspace you probably don't want a full Vim anyway (and you can use vim-tiny).

whatisyour 3y ago

Vim (Or rather neovim) now is that tool that grows with you as you age. So, as you mentioned, even I have small small things I've added and removed from my vim/neovim setup over the years as I have changed with the code. For me personally, the benefits are worth it, because the neovim approach really works well with my way of working with editors. And the "personally" part is really important. In my early years I have used IDEs and I was never really interested in using Vim in the first place. (I thought it was not very nice looking when I first looked at the empty screen). I only started using it because I found other IDEs (CLion, Visual Studio) and so on not very comfortable. Even now, I have tried quite hard to use VSCode due to its support for remote development which I really like as a feature. However, I keep coming back to Vim it seems. So, for me, vim is an appropriate tool, but it might not be for you, because we might be thinking about text editing in fundamentally different ways.

galkk 3y ago
I don't feel that we thinking about it differntly. It is that editing source code is much more than just editing text. And vim severely lacking as an IDE. We don't need to associate motion style navigating and separation of command and insertion modes as something very vim specific. It is that vim is installed on every machine that I work on in like 99% of cases, and it made sense to me to learn something that is always available. But the shortcomings are very clear. I can give an analogy of gdb. I feel that anyone who says that text mode gdb is anywhere near convenience that you get using modern IDE is suffering from stockholm syndrome. Yes, obviously it is more powerful in some circumstances, but for day to day use it is just plain inconvenient. And that's why I said in my first post - I settle on vim as text editor, but I gave up trying to set it as an IDE, so I will never code in it, unless I'm forced to (who knows, weird job that requires vim use etc). Life is too short for that amount of tinkering.
- Asooka 3y ago
  Text mode GDB is very clunky, but it is better than any frontend I have tried. Whatever pain points it has, I can mostly work around with scripts, which isn't possible with a GUI. The worst part is that it's awfully slow for programs with a plugin architecture. If I set a pending breakpoint before starting the program, I can wait ten minutes until all plugins are loaded. I really wish I could tell it to preload some debug information at the start.

lelanthran 3y ago

> * Wrap long lines by whole words if possible? No default setting, I guess I need to search for plugin for that too. Shift-V:!fmt Works on all blocks, not only lines.

galkk 3y ago
I didn't mean formatting, but just "wrap lines in editor". So long lines always fit screen, without actually inserting line separators. I was speaking about set wrap but because I turn on display invisible symbols, set linebreak doesn't work. Why? I don't know. Somehow IDEs can do that without issues, but the technology isn't there yet for vim, seems like.

kazinator 3y ago

> Do you want autodetect indent and tab rule in file? Install plugin. https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/c-snippets/tree/autotab.c https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/c-snippets/tree/autotab.c

roryrjb 3y ago
Nice, it works well!

lawn 3y ago

Some see having to install and configure a plugin as a bug, but I see it as a feature. You can also get modern IDE features such as LSP supported renames in Vim, so it's not an either fast typing or good refactoring support, you can get both.

erfgh 3y ago

I don't see any of those features as improvements. Even when I had to use an IDE (java...) I never enabled any of that.

drbaba 3y ago

Not to detract from your general point - I definitely see the value in using an IDE with a Vim plugin, and often do so myself. > Vertical scrollbar? Plugin If you want scrollbars, the right solution is IMO to use a GUI Vim. I often use MacVim which is great, GVim is the obvious alternative on Linux/Windows, and NeoVim has lots of options (including, arguably, VSCode-NeoVim which is also great). With MacVim, I can pop around randomly in a terminal and open Vim instances that run in the terminal as usual - and if I start editing something for long, I can type :gui to pop up an actual MacVim GUI window. I believe the same works in GVim. > * Autocomplete code using lsp? Dance with plugins or copy paste literal screens of configs for nvim I was annoyed by this as well. I then discovered that ALE (the venerable pre-LSP plugin for async linting) now has full LSP support, and it all “just works”. Doesn’t require NeoVim either. Just install the ALE plugin and put LSP servers in $PATH. ALE will find and use them. (By default, it uses standard Vim bindings like C-x C-o for completion, but you can change it.) > * Want nice looking theme? Plugin! (Gruvbox in my case) Vim 9.x (not NeoVim) has added a built-in Gruvbox theme named “retrobox” (both light and dark variants based on your background setting). If you don’t have it yet, you can get it as a plugin from here until your Vim updates: https://github.com/vim/colorschemes https://github.com/vim/colorschemes > * Wrap long lines by whole words if possible? No default setting, I guess I need to search for plugin for that too. There are built-in settings for this, but yeah it requires some initial fiddling to get it nice. (After that initial fiddling, I’ve been annoyed by how word wrap works in any other editor.)