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Vim's model of modality and mnemonics is a beautiful, powerful, amazing paradigm. Here's the thing though - there's no such thing as the "vim-mode". None of the

Vim's model of modality and mnemonics is a beautiful, powerful, amazing paradigm. Here's the thing though - there's no such thing as the "vim-mode". None of the IDEs and editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, XCode, Android Studio, Sublime, etc., can properly emulate Vim navigation. The one exception is Emacs. Pretty much every other IDE fails to comprehensively replicate Vim. Unless it's Vim/Neovim, vim-mode in all of them is just that - an emulation. However, Evil mode in Emacs feels much more natural. Sometimes, you forget that it's an afterthought, an extension, and not a built-in functionality. Just that alone speaks volumes about the extensibility of Emacs. While Evil-mode (the Extensible VI Layer for Emacs) obviously is not the most important or even built-in feature of Emacs, as a nerd and a computer programmer, if I discovered that there's a civilian plane that can perform a vertical landing, yet never actually needs to use it, I would still love that model over any other planes, even if the feature is purely accidental. The fact that it can do so alone would be great evidence of amazing engineering. And as a die-hard Vimmer, one day I had a revelation - I realized that Emacs vims better than Vim and Neovim. While also opening possibilities for many, many other things.

rstuart4133 3y ago
> None of the IDEs and editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, XCode, Android Studio, Sublime, etc., can properly emulate Vim navigation. I'm been a vi/vim user for 40 years, and VSCode's emulation is good enough for me. Given the number of installs I'd say it's good enough for a lot of people. But I still go back to vim over vscode. That's because VSCode can be an absolute dog. I've seen it take 10 seconds to respond to a keystroke on a Thankpad-X1 with 32GB of RAM. The syntax error highlighting can take minutes to catch up, "go to definition" fines up a spinner for so long it's literally faster to find it yourself. Meanwhile, vim is instantaneous at just about everything. It may not be pretty or as helpful, but when code is flowing from the fingers it gets out of the way and lets it happen.
- iLemming 3y ago
  > VSCode's emulation is good enough for me Oh come on. It doesn't even "vimify" things in other than the file editor, which basically is the same for every app with vim emulation. Vim feels amazing in Neovim. In other IDEs, if you aspire to be an "advanced vimmer", you'd quickly hit a bunch of limitations. The most significant one is that you cannot vimify things in every tool window In Emacs, you can "Evilify" pretty much any buffer, allowing vim-navigation use in Dired and Magit, and anywhere else (even in the minibuffer). You also have the ability to extend any command, adding extra features like custom ex-commands, for instance. As far as I know, such functionality is not even available in vanilla Vim. Hoping for similar features in IDEAVim or the VSCode Vim plugins is wishful thinking. Besides, even with barebones, after installing Vim plugin in VSCode (I tried multiple) there's some noticeable latency, while my Emacs instance, with over 300 added plugins still feels zippy.

rstuart4133 3y ago

> None of the IDEs and editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, XCode, Android Studio, Sublime, etc., can properly emulate Vim navigation. I'm been a vi/vim user for 40 years, and VSCode's emulation is good enough for me. Given the number of installs I'd say it's good enough for a lot of people. But I still go back to vim over vscode. That's because VSCode can be an absolute dog. I've seen it take 10 seconds to respond to a keystroke on a Thankpad-X1 with 32GB of RAM. The syntax error highlighting can take minutes to catch up, "go to definition" fines up a spinner for so long it's literally faster to find it yourself. Meanwhile, vim is instantaneous at just about everything. It may not be pretty or as helpful, but when code is flowing from the fingers it gets out of the way and lets it happen.

iLemming 3y ago
> VSCode's emulation is good enough for me Oh come on. It doesn't even "vimify" things in other than the file editor, which basically is the same for every app with vim emulation. Vim feels amazing in Neovim. In other IDEs, if you aspire to be an "advanced vimmer", you'd quickly hit a bunch of limitations. The most significant one is that you cannot vimify things in every tool window In Emacs, you can "Evilify" pretty much any buffer, allowing vim-navigation use in Dired and Magit, and anywhere else (even in the minibuffer). You also have the ability to extend any command, adding extra features like custom ex-commands, for instance. As far as I know, such functionality is not even available in vanilla Vim. Hoping for similar features in IDEAVim or the VSCode Vim plugins is wishful thinking. Besides, even with barebones, after installing Vim plugin in VSCode (I tried multiple) there's some noticeable latency, while my Emacs instance, with over 300 added plugins still feels zippy.