9 ms·

Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

29 points by asicsp 2y ago

makeitdouble 2y ago
> if you think it's everywhere One of the counterpoint is vim not being available on Windows. But It is. Not by default, but most critical stuff aren't there by default anyway and vim will be one of the easiest block to have ready. Then Windows comes with WSL, where I think most people who even care in passing about vim will spend their time, so we're back to the editor they'd use on Linux anyway. That was to me the main reason I went with Vim when I first touched an nuix system, and to this day that's still a good enough reason to keep using it where a full IDE isn't required. Any system I've seen had a simple enough way to get vim, that hasn't changed.
- johncoltrane 2y ago
  At the time of writing, the supposed ubiquity of Vim, or rather Vi-clones, was often touted as a strong selling point by people with a severe case of Linux-myopia. The "counterpoint" is not that Vim is not _available_ on Windows. It is that Vim is not on Windows _out of the box_. You must install the native binary to have it or, like you suggest, install _another system_ on your machine… that actually comes with Vim. "Can have X" is not the same as "has X". FWIW, experimenting with Linux is also what got me hooked to Vim (and the shell and all the rest) in the first place, but rose-tinted glasses are not for me.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    I'm with you on vim not being there out of the box. I mean, even on Debian it's not in by default. But I also feel that ship has sailed for most software. We joke that windows/macos's default browser is only there to go install Chrome/firefox or any other browser of choice, and I see the wider reality of it as most OSes requirement a decent amount of installation to get to a usable point, even for very basic tasks. It's still easier to use software that is mostly available everywhere in mostly the same shape and form (also why so many people bet on VSCode I think)
- eviks 2y ago
  The "everywhere" argument is exactly about the defaults, otherwise there's no benefit, most alternatives are available via an install
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    Yes and no, if you favorite editor was Tilde you'd be in a lot more pain to have it work on most non linux. Vim is either already installed or at one click/one command away almost whatever the system you use, that's the closest we'll ever have from "everywhere" in this day and age IMHO.
nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
I'm a big fan of Vim, but I hardly use it as my primary editor anymore (applies for Neovim as well). I think the ecosystem is amazing, but I hardly have the patience to set things up to feature parity with other editors. Debuggers are the biggest missing/hard to configure feature. I do, however, use Vim bindings in every editor that supports them (and extensions for browsers like Vimium). The extensions/Editor functionality are hit-or-miss; some are missing key bindings that I use often, or features don't quite work correctly, but I find it much more enjoyable to use than the "typical" approach. The VSCode one is pretty good (even has EasyMotion/Sneak out of the box, if that's your style), but often seems to slow down and buffer keystrokes on heavy load/undo seems very hit or miss.
- emresahin 2y ago
  Did you try Lazyvim?
  - Shadowmist 2y ago
    Naw it is too much effort to set up.
    - lawn 2y ago
      I've seen many takes on these "NeoVim distros", but them being too much effort is new.
- stevekemp 2y ago
  For 20+ years I did all my coding, development, and miscellaneous tasks in Emacs. But I used vim exclusively for writing emails - initially with mutt, and later with different mail clients. There were times, now and again, where I'd use vi, or vim, on solaris, or other "weird" systems. But basically I used vim for emails and emacs for everything else, and I think that was a good split. Were I telling somebody to start a new editor these days I think I'd probably echo the recommendation to use the integrated tutorial, but after that just "jump in". gvim, emacs, and similar have menubars that help with many things before you learn the keystrokes required and there's no shame in using them. The article suggests learning and experimenting before switching, but to me that seems very counter-intuitive.
xcdzvyn 2y ago
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mewpmewp2 2y ago
What is the consensus on productivity with Vim? I have thought about trying out the keyboard only approach, but haven't wanted to invest time in it yet. When I see people on YouTube using Vim it slightly feels like there's a whole lot of keypresses happening, but not a lot is actually gained compared to using a mouse or even frequently it seems it takes a while to do something that is much quicker with the mouse. I understand half the point is to be able to keep your hands focused in one place, but how do people feel about the productivity?
- keyle 2y ago
  In my experience non-vim people are neither more or less productive than vim people. Pick your poison. Productivity comes down to so much more than typing/navigating/yanking fast. Especially when it comes to programming, which is 95% thinking, 4% swearing internally and 1% typing.
  - 0x1ceb00da 2y ago
    Spot on. The smartest guy I know uses cmd.exe and barebone emacs as notepad with tabs.
  - katzenversteher 2y ago
    Oh, the swearing is supposed to be internal? That's probably why my colleagues give me these strange looks...
- dcre 2y ago
  Once you start using it, you can’t edit any other way. I don’t think it’s well established whether it’s actually faster or better in any objective sense. It certainly feels faster than using a mouse, or if not faster, maybe less frustrating. Here is how I think about it: the depth of these keyboard-based editors allows for a kind of progressive mastery and you decide how far to pursue it. Plenty of people use Vim in a very rudimentary way, barely using any of the features, and they still might prefer it. Others know certain slices of the functionality available, but everyone knows a different slice depending on how they want to edit. The point is it’s sort of an open space with lots of texture and customizability, which is sometimes how professionals like their tools. It lets you sort of build the tool into what you want it to be. And that can be true even without elaborate customization: even with a stock NeoVim install, figuring out over time which subset of features you care about is a kind of customization. One tip I have: if you use VS Code, try the Vim extension. Or whatever IDE you use, see if it has a vim mode. That is by far the best way to learn, and it may well be the best way for you to use Vim long-term. You don’t have to change editors, you don’t have to configure anything, you can just focus on moving the cursor around in a new way.
BigParm 2y ago
I always start with Vim and change when it's no longer cutting it.
malikNF 2y ago
One of my favorite things about using vim as my main IDE is, I can run it on a linux server. My work has me moving around the country. I program on a vim instance running on a remote server. I just need to carry a tiny laptop around. I usually get an okay ping(<100ms) and if its unacceptable (overseas travel) I change the vm location. Depending on what I am working on I can increase or decrease resources and since things I program usually end up running on ubuntu servers it feels right at home. edit- Incase anyone is wondering, I actually started doing this since one of my laptops once got lost while traveling. Airline did find mybag later, but the two weeks without it drove me crazy. Now, if I want I can just show up anywhere get a fresh laptop load up my ssh keys and im all set lol.
- magnio 2y ago
  Does that have any advantage over VSCode Remote SSH?
  - ar_lan 2y ago
    Yes. 1. You're already in your terminal. 2. You get to use Vim (if that's your thing). 3. You don't have to use VSCode (if it's not your thing).
    - malikNF 2y ago
      Pretty much this. And, 4. Not MS.
  - NobodyNada 2y ago
    While I don't use VSCode myself, many students and faculty at my school did, and the VSCode SSH extension seems to have some performance issues. It works by copying a server binary onto the remote computer; however, that process is quite heavy in terms of resource usage on the remote, using hundreds of MB of RAM in usual cases (which adds up when you have hundreds of students doing their assignments on one server), and 10s of GB at the extreme. It's also particularly bad about cleaning up after itself: oftentimes, when users disconnect their session, the VSCode instance continues running on the remote server forever until it's manually killed (and every time the user starts a new session, it starts a new process instead of reusing an old one). Our school servers have a 200-process-per-user quota to prevent accidental fork bombs; students frequently hit this limit and become unable to log into a shell, because their entire quota is taken up by VSCode SSH processes that have accumulated over months. The combination of these two effects have caused serious problems over the past couple years as VSCode adoption has rapidly increased among the student base, to the point that some professors have banned VSCode from their classes, due to the SSH extension making the class servers completely unusable for everyone during the big rush a few hours before an assignment is due.
exmadscientist 2y ago
Counterpoint (or at least counter-consideration): Sometimes Vim is really, truly, absolutely the very best tool for the job and very much worth your time. I learned Vim because I had to edit code through an ssh tunnel, limited to text only, and nano just wasn't cutting it any more. This is pretty much the exact thing vim was born to do, so it was a pretty clear win to learn Vim, despite the horrifying learning curve. And now I know Vim!
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Well there are a lot of text-only editors better than nano. Emacs of course is the big one, but there are probably a half-dozen others with varying amounts of featuers. Unless you also meant "installed by default" then vi[m] is probably about it.
dcre 2y ago
To be blunt, I think this is not good. The claims are dubious on a factual level (you really can get most IDE functionality in Vim, or at least in NeoVim) and it’s framed in such a discouraging, knowing way. I admit I might have found this motivating when I was younger (and that’s probably why it’s framed this way) but ultimately on net I think this is pointlessly intimidating. Unrelated: Helix is a great vim-like editor that has a selection-first editing model that I prefer and requires much less configuration. https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/
RVuRnvbM2e 2y ago
(2020)
- dang 2y ago
  Added above. Thanks!
dang 2y ago
Related: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33850674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33850674 - Dec 2022 (14 comments)
alabhyajindal 2y ago
I hate those YouTube videos "turn vim into an IDE". The people who watch those only care about bragging that they use vim, nothing else.
- aulin 2y ago
  imaging being so disconnected from reality to think that your editor of choice if something to brag about
  - smaudet 2y ago
    One could say the same about any interest, really...imagine bragging what sort of car you drive, as if that makes any real difference. Of course, you say, driving some expensive car means you get more attention, right? Well, yes, and it doesn't make you any better of a person...if your text editor is your car and people care about what car you drive, then maybe it also gets you some attention... But yes it is sad that we get wrapped up in the unimportant things in life. Good to have some escapes, too, though.
    - aulin 2y ago
      My point was more that sometimes with modern internet it's quite easy to end up in a very specific and small bubble and think it represents the world. But sure I guess you're right, as long as there is an audience willing to listen you can brag about anything. I can count on one hand people in my real life circle who would care about me using emacs. Cars are different, they are related to economical accomplishment, which is more universally accepted as something to brag about.
- lawn 2y ago
  > The people who watch those only care about bragging that they use vim, nothing else. No? Some people want to know how to get IDE features such as errors, goto definition and type inlay hints into their editor of choice. It's frankly hilarious to think that "it's only for bragging rights". It says more about you than anyone else.
RVuRnvbM2e 2y ago
This is four years old. It was outdated at the time it was written, and now it is woefully outdated. For example: > From sketchy terminal integration, to being single-threaded, via the lack of anything resembling a proper internal plugin API, nothing in Vim can be leveraged to give you a convincing Integrated Development Environment. https://neovim.io/doc/user/api.html https://neovim.io/doc/user/api.html
- phatskat 2y ago
  I was thinking the same thing - granted, the OP is technically referring to Vim and not NeoVim. Still, today’s terminal integration is incredibly smooth, and Lua in NeoVim has been a dream for someone who spent way too long attempting to learn VimScript and has never written a lick of Lua in my life.
tomxor 2y ago
This is so true. Over 10 years ago I began craving the idea that is vim - and now I am a vim/neovim user, but it was a gradual process. I've used all kinds of stuff, 20 years ago TextMate was the first I used for serious programming, then Sublime Text as I switched to BSD and Linux, then Atom. I tended to par Atom down to the essentials, but just like everyone else got gradually more and more frustrated with the performance and instability, so I began to play with vim and quickly discovered it's not so easy to jump in. I didn't want an IDE, but I did want some modern features like git integration, so my initial vim plugin count was reasonable. What I really struggled with initially was the lack of standard cursor movement, with select/deselect (autoreturn to insert), i.e what basically everything other input field and editor behaves like - even once I was comfortable with the vim way, switching between browser input fields and vim just felt annoying - eventually I configured my way around that so I can have the best of both. Going full vim took some back and forth. Using it on servers out of necessity really helped. One day, when an Atom update broke my configuration yet again, I deleted it and went all in on vim, I'm not sure how long it's been now, probably 6 years - and I'm still learning. So yeah... one does not simply recommend vim, but it is awesome, and weird. My favourite thing about vim... I've had the same config from the start, it has never broken due to an update. I value that so much.
wruza 2y ago
sketchy terminal integration Vim’s :terminal is better than win10 terminal. And than Konsole too, for that matter. (Maybe I mistaken “integration” for something else.) to being single-threaded Is this a problem? All language servers run async in different processes. I don’t think vscode is multi-threaded either. Multi-processed sure. Threads are mostly dead. I’m not a vim missionary, don’t use it, don’t learn it, don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch. But these arguments make little sense. The rest varies from okay to low quality bait, tbh.
- johncoltrane 2y ago
  > Maybe I mistaken “integration” for something else. Yes, you do. This is about how Vim integrates with the host terminal emulator and shell.
nurettin 2y ago
I had to start using vim back in the early 2000s, because nano didn't make it easy to search, modify and navigate large config files using regex. It was out of pure necessity.
BanazirGalbasi 2y ago
Regarding using the right tool for the job: > sed, awk, cut, a quick bash one-liner, a simpler editor, an infinitely more powerful IDE, an actual IRC or mail client, an actual presentation program, some online CSV-to-JSON converter, etc. All of these will take time to learn or find. I know basic sed syntax but I'm never 100% sure that my edit does exactly what I want, so I end up running without -i and then with. I don't know awk at all. I use cut but always mess up the field numbers, and if there's multiple spaces involved then forget it. In all of these cases, it's faster for me to open the file in vim, make the change or grab the word I need, then exit. I'm not saying the tools are useless, but vim is flexible and covers a lot of use cases. Half these examples are gui programs. Who is realistically trying to replace a presentation program with vim? These seem like strawmen to pad out the list. Is vim the right tool for every job? No, definitely not. But I think it does well enough that it's okay to lean on it if you already know it.
emresahin 2y ago
I set up F2 to run the shell command on a line in nvim, and I noticed it improved my shell productivity. I run tests with with cargo test, rspec, pytest etc by writing the command on a line, hitting F2 and all results are just there. I can navigate to errors, search traces or whatnot all the same as I navigate the code. I can search GitHub issues when I'm writing a commit message with gh. This is just a simple productivity hack that I can't replicate in other editors. I'm sure there are better special tools but vim is the most general purpose tool you can learn and use. I never had regrets to invest time on it.
andrewstuart 2y ago
I made the mistake of using vim before switching to an IDE. I bought in to all the tough guy talk and put tons of effort into learning the arcane key combinations and trying and failing to get plugins to work to make it do basic programming stuff. Utterly pointless - use an IDE - if you are a professional programmer it is the one tool you use all day every day, spend the money for the best one you can that has a team of people working on it full time, paid well to make that IDE awesome. I use vim all the time now for simple text editing when logged in to a machine but I'd never dream of using it for programming. I know how to cut and paste lines in vim and how to save and exit, nothing more needed.
PhilipRoman 2y ago
Ironically text editing is the thing I like least about vim. I would switch to an IDE if it provided the level of programmability Vim has. For example, I have a binding which, when used on a netlink command, opens the corresponding implementation in the kernel. How do you do that in something like VSCode? I guess I could write an extension, but in Vim it takes like 2 lines of code that you write once and forget about it. Or another example - you can analyze log files in terminal buffer by folding based on patterns, multi-color highlighting, etc.
- phatskat 2y ago
  The ability to quickly and easily(-ish) script vim is incredibly useful. At one point, because of environment constraints, the easiest way to run unit tests was either to run them all or to specify the file I wanted to test. A little bit of googling and playing around and I had Vim read my current spec name, chop it up to find the correct source file name, spawn a terminal and run the test command using that source name anytime I wrote a change. Thankfully I’m somewhere with sane tooling that watches for changes and only runs relevant tests, but back then this little foray into “how do I make Vim do a thing” saved me a ton of time.
lawn 2y ago
> While some recent advancements may hint at future changes in that direction, Vim currently lacks everything it would need to be considered/used as an IDE. I disagree. Neovim can be considered an IDE with the caveat that you have to configure it as such and use plugins. > From sketchy terminal integration What's so sketchy about it? The terminal integration in both Vim and Neovim are decent, and you can always do Ctrl+z to go back to your "proper" terminal and do whatever. > to being single-threaded Sure, everything isn't multithreaded although you can write asynchronous configurations and plugins. Regardless, Neovim is more than fast enough (and certainly much faster than the comparable IDEs) so I don't see the critique being valid. > via the lack of anything resembling a proper internal plugin API Neovim has a very good API for writing plugins in Lua. > nothing in Vim can be leveraged to give you a convincing Integrated Development Environment. That's just false and ignorant.
- deleted 2y ago
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oswalk 2y ago
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daft_pink 2y ago
The real reason to learn vim is so you can login to any linux server and edit. You learn it and if you enjoy it you can go deeper. I use VSCode on my desktop and I’m not about to give up a graphical IDE, but it’s great to be able to ssh into any linux server or container and be able to efficiently edit with just a keyboard when you need to.
ggm 2y ago
If your finger memory is locked to hjkl and ESC, you probably have very little choice.
theshrike79 2y ago
How many 10+ year veterans of the software industry are actually only limited by their typing speed and need to maximise it with vim? I do kinda get the feeling you get when you can transfer your thoughts to screen as efficiently as possible. But really, if your typing speed is the only thing holding you back when coding, it's a bit suspicious to me.
- fingerlocks 2y ago
  Using vim to improve typing speed is an age old misconception, bordering on straw-man. The real appeal is the flexibility to script and customize a general purpose editor and make it bend to your will. For example, make a key binding that moves between only functions that have a particular signature. Or a shortcut that takes heap snapshots, filters and format the output to your liking, and have it displayed alongside the source file with the suspected memory leak your hunting. Otherwise no I still can’t get used to using j and k to move up and down even after a decade of vim.
jmclnx 2y ago
Least we forget, UNIX type systems is an IDE with many small tools. Plus you can batch up mass changes and run in background which you cannot do with an modern IDE. See Unix as IDE (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789528
k2m 2y ago
I moved to NeoVim recently and I never missed VSCode. Most of my development happens in remote machine and I found VSCode symbol look up, code navigation painfully slow and sometimes it doesn't autocomplete. When I update my repo, all linting and LSP features stop working in VSCode. In NeoVim, it happened 0 times so far. So, yeah, OP is wrong. VIM(NeoVIM may be) is as good as any other IDE out there.

29 points by asicsp 2y ago

> if you think it's everywhere One of the counterpoint is vim not being available on Windows. But It is. Not by default, but most critical stuff aren't there by default anyway and vim will be one of the easiest block to have ready. Then Windows comes with WSL, where I think most people who even care in passing about vim will spend their time, so we're back to the editor they'd use on Linux anyway. That was to me the main reason I went with Vim when I first touched an nuix system, and to this day that's still a good enough reason to keep using it where a full IDE isn't required. Any system I've seen had a simple enough way to get vim, that hasn't changed.

johncoltrane 2y ago
At the time of writing, the supposed ubiquity of Vim, or rather Vi-clones, was often touted as a strong selling point by people with a severe case of Linux-myopia. The "counterpoint" is not that Vim is not _available_ on Windows. It is that Vim is not on Windows _out of the box_. You must install the native binary to have it or, like you suggest, install _another system_ on your machine… that actually comes with Vim. "Can have X" is not the same as "has X". FWIW, experimenting with Linux is also what got me hooked to Vim (and the shell and all the rest) in the first place, but rose-tinted glasses are not for me.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  I'm with you on vim not being there out of the box. I mean, even on Debian it's not in by default. But I also feel that ship has sailed for most software. We joke that windows/macos's default browser is only there to go install Chrome/firefox or any other browser of choice, and I see the wider reality of it as most OSes requirement a decent amount of installation to get to a usable point, even for very basic tasks. It's still easier to use software that is mostly available everywhere in mostly the same shape and form (also why so many people bet on VSCode I think)
eviks 2y ago
The "everywhere" argument is exactly about the defaults, otherwise there's no benefit, most alternatives are available via an install
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Yes and no, if you favorite editor was Tilde you'd be in a lot more pain to have it work on most non linux. Vim is either already installed or at one click/one command away almost whatever the system you use, that's the closest we'll ever have from "everywhere" in this day and age IMHO.

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago

I'm a big fan of Vim, but I hardly use it as my primary editor anymore (applies for Neovim as well). I think the ecosystem is amazing, but I hardly have the patience to set things up to feature parity with other editors. Debuggers are the biggest missing/hard to configure feature. I do, however, use Vim bindings in every editor that supports them (and extensions for browsers like Vimium). The extensions/Editor functionality are hit-or-miss; some are missing key bindings that I use often, or features don't quite work correctly, but I find it much more enjoyable to use than the "typical" approach. The VSCode one is pretty good (even has EasyMotion/Sneak out of the box, if that's your style), but often seems to slow down and buffer keystrokes on heavy load/undo seems very hit or miss.

emresahin 2y ago
Did you try Lazyvim?
- Shadowmist 2y ago
  Naw it is too much effort to set up.
  - lawn 2y ago
    I've seen many takes on these "NeoVim distros", but them being too much effort is new.
stevekemp 2y ago
For 20+ years I did all my coding, development, and miscellaneous tasks in Emacs. But I used vim exclusively for writing emails - initially with mutt, and later with different mail clients. There were times, now and again, where I'd use vi, or vim, on solaris, or other "weird" systems. But basically I used vim for emails and emacs for everything else, and I think that was a good split. Were I telling somebody to start a new editor these days I think I'd probably echo the recommendation to use the integrated tutorial, but after that just "jump in". gvim, emacs, and similar have menubars that help with many things before you learn the keystrokes required and there's no shame in using them. The article suggests learning and experimenting before switching, but to me that seems very counter-intuitive.

xcdzvyn 2y ago

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mewpmewp2 2y ago

What is the consensus on productivity with Vim? I have thought about trying out the keyboard only approach, but haven't wanted to invest time in it yet. When I see people on YouTube using Vim it slightly feels like there's a whole lot of keypresses happening, but not a lot is actually gained compared to using a mouse or even frequently it seems it takes a while to do something that is much quicker with the mouse. I understand half the point is to be able to keep your hands focused in one place, but how do people feel about the productivity?

keyle 2y ago
In my experience non-vim people are neither more or less productive than vim people. Pick your poison. Productivity comes down to so much more than typing/navigating/yanking fast. Especially when it comes to programming, which is 95% thinking, 4% swearing internally and 1% typing.
- 0x1ceb00da 2y ago
  Spot on. The smartest guy I know uses cmd.exe and barebone emacs as notepad with tabs.
- katzenversteher 2y ago
  Oh, the swearing is supposed to be internal? That's probably why my colleagues give me these strange looks...
dcre 2y ago
Once you start using it, you can’t edit any other way. I don’t think it’s well established whether it’s actually faster or better in any objective sense. It certainly feels faster than using a mouse, or if not faster, maybe less frustrating. Here is how I think about it: the depth of these keyboard-based editors allows for a kind of progressive mastery and you decide how far to pursue it. Plenty of people use Vim in a very rudimentary way, barely using any of the features, and they still might prefer it. Others know certain slices of the functionality available, but everyone knows a different slice depending on how they want to edit. The point is it’s sort of an open space with lots of texture and customizability, which is sometimes how professionals like their tools. It lets you sort of build the tool into what you want it to be. And that can be true even without elaborate customization: even with a stock NeoVim install, figuring out over time which subset of features you care about is a kind of customization. One tip I have: if you use VS Code, try the Vim extension. Or whatever IDE you use, see if it has a vim mode. That is by far the best way to learn, and it may well be the best way for you to use Vim long-term. You don’t have to change editors, you don’t have to configure anything, you can just focus on moving the cursor around in a new way.

BigParm 2y ago

I always start with Vim and change when it's no longer cutting it.

malikNF 2y ago

One of my favorite things about using vim as my main IDE is, I can run it on a linux server. My work has me moving around the country. I program on a vim instance running on a remote server. I just need to carry a tiny laptop around. I usually get an okay ping(<100ms) and if its unacceptable (overseas travel) I change the vm location. Depending on what I am working on I can increase or decrease resources and since things I program usually end up running on ubuntu servers it feels right at home. edit- Incase anyone is wondering, I actually started doing this since one of my laptops once got lost while traveling. Airline did find mybag later, but the two weeks without it drove me crazy. Now, if I want I can just show up anywhere get a fresh laptop load up my ssh keys and im all set lol.

magnio 2y ago
Does that have any advantage over VSCode Remote SSH?
- ar_lan 2y ago
  Yes. 1. You're already in your terminal. 2. You get to use Vim (if that's your thing). 3. You don't have to use VSCode (if it's not your thing).
  - malikNF 2y ago
    Pretty much this. And, 4. Not MS.
- NobodyNada 2y ago
  While I don't use VSCode myself, many students and faculty at my school did, and the VSCode SSH extension seems to have some performance issues. It works by copying a server binary onto the remote computer; however, that process is quite heavy in terms of resource usage on the remote, using hundreds of MB of RAM in usual cases (which adds up when you have hundreds of students doing their assignments on one server), and 10s of GB at the extreme. It's also particularly bad about cleaning up after itself: oftentimes, when users disconnect their session, the VSCode instance continues running on the remote server forever until it's manually killed (and every time the user starts a new session, it starts a new process instead of reusing an old one). Our school servers have a 200-process-per-user quota to prevent accidental fork bombs; students frequently hit this limit and become unable to log into a shell, because their entire quota is taken up by VSCode SSH processes that have accumulated over months. The combination of these two effects have caused serious problems over the past couple years as VSCode adoption has rapidly increased among the student base, to the point that some professors have banned VSCode from their classes, due to the SSH extension making the class servers completely unusable for everyone during the big rush a few hours before an assignment is due.

exmadscientist 2y ago

Counterpoint (or at least counter-consideration): Sometimes Vim is really, truly, absolutely the very best tool for the job and very much worth your time. I learned Vim because I had to edit code through an ssh tunnel, limited to text only, and nano just wasn't cutting it any more. This is pretty much the exact thing vim was born to do, so it was a pretty clear win to learn Vim, despite the horrifying learning curve. And now I know Vim!

SoftTalker 2y ago
Well there are a lot of text-only editors better than nano. Emacs of course is the big one, but there are probably a half-dozen others with varying amounts of featuers. Unless you also meant "installed by default" then vi[m] is probably about it.

dcre 2y ago

To be blunt, I think this is not good. The claims are dubious on a factual level (you really can get most IDE functionality in Vim, or at least in NeoVim) and it’s framed in such a discouraging, knowing way. I admit I might have found this motivating when I was younger (and that’s probably why it’s framed this way) but ultimately on net I think this is pointlessly intimidating. Unrelated: Helix is a great vim-like editor that has a selection-first editing model that I prefer and requires much less configuration. https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/

RVuRnvbM2e 2y ago

(2020)

dang 2y ago
Added above. Thanks!

dang 2y ago

Related: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33850674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33850674 - Dec 2022 (14 comments)

alabhyajindal 2y ago

I hate those YouTube videos "turn vim into an IDE". The people who watch those only care about bragging that they use vim, nothing else.

aulin 2y ago
imaging being so disconnected from reality to think that your editor of choice if something to brag about
- smaudet 2y ago
  One could say the same about any interest, really...imagine bragging what sort of car you drive, as if that makes any real difference. Of course, you say, driving some expensive car means you get more attention, right? Well, yes, and it doesn't make you any better of a person...if your text editor is your car and people care about what car you drive, then maybe it also gets you some attention... But yes it is sad that we get wrapped up in the unimportant things in life. Good to have some escapes, too, though.
  - aulin 2y ago
    My point was more that sometimes with modern internet it's quite easy to end up in a very specific and small bubble and think it represents the world. But sure I guess you're right, as long as there is an audience willing to listen you can brag about anything. I can count on one hand people in my real life circle who would care about me using emacs. Cars are different, they are related to economical accomplishment, which is more universally accepted as something to brag about.
lawn 2y ago
> The people who watch those only care about bragging that they use vim, nothing else. No? Some people want to know how to get IDE features such as errors, goto definition and type inlay hints into their editor of choice. It's frankly hilarious to think that "it's only for bragging rights". It says more about you than anyone else.

RVuRnvbM2e 2y ago

This is four years old. It was outdated at the time it was written, and now it is woefully outdated. For example: > From sketchy terminal integration, to being single-threaded, via the lack of anything resembling a proper internal plugin API, nothing in Vim can be leveraged to give you a convincing Integrated Development Environment. https://neovim.io/doc/user/api.html https://neovim.io/doc/user/api.html

phatskat 2y ago
I was thinking the same thing - granted, the OP is technically referring to Vim and not NeoVim. Still, today’s terminal integration is incredibly smooth, and Lua in NeoVim has been a dream for someone who spent way too long attempting to learn VimScript and has never written a lick of Lua in my life.

tomxor 2y ago

This is so true. Over 10 years ago I began craving the idea that is vim - and now I am a vim/neovim user, but it was a gradual process. I've used all kinds of stuff, 20 years ago TextMate was the first I used for serious programming, then Sublime Text as I switched to BSD and Linux, then Atom. I tended to par Atom down to the essentials, but just like everyone else got gradually more and more frustrated with the performance and instability, so I began to play with vim and quickly discovered it's not so easy to jump in. I didn't want an IDE, but I did want some modern features like git integration, so my initial vim plugin count was reasonable. What I really struggled with initially was the lack of standard cursor movement, with select/deselect (autoreturn to insert), i.e what basically everything other input field and editor behaves like - even once I was comfortable with the vim way, switching between browser input fields and vim just felt annoying - eventually I configured my way around that so I can have the best of both. Going full vim took some back and forth. Using it on servers out of necessity really helped. One day, when an Atom update broke my configuration yet again, I deleted it and went all in on vim, I'm not sure how long it's been now, probably 6 years - and I'm still learning. So yeah... one does not simply recommend vim, but it is awesome, and weird. My favourite thing about vim... I've had the same config from the start, it has never broken due to an update. I value that so much.

wruza 2y ago

sketchy terminal integration Vim’s :terminal is better than win10 terminal. And than Konsole too, for that matter. (Maybe I mistaken “integration” for something else.) to being single-threaded Is this a problem? All language servers run async in different processes. I don’t think vscode is multi-threaded either. Multi-processed sure. Threads are mostly dead. I’m not a vim missionary, don’t use it, don’t learn it, don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch. But these arguments make little sense. The rest varies from okay to low quality bait, tbh.

johncoltrane 2y ago
> Maybe I mistaken “integration” for something else. Yes, you do. This is about how Vim integrates with the host terminal emulator and shell.

nurettin 2y ago

I had to start using vim back in the early 2000s, because nano didn't make it easy to search, modify and navigate large config files using regex. It was out of pure necessity.

BanazirGalbasi 2y ago

Regarding using the right tool for the job: > sed, awk, cut, a quick bash one-liner, a simpler editor, an infinitely more powerful IDE, an actual IRC or mail client, an actual presentation program, some online CSV-to-JSON converter, etc. All of these will take time to learn or find. I know basic sed syntax but I'm never 100% sure that my edit does exactly what I want, so I end up running without -i and then with. I don't know awk at all. I use cut but always mess up the field numbers, and if there's multiple spaces involved then forget it. In all of these cases, it's faster for me to open the file in vim, make the change or grab the word I need, then exit. I'm not saying the tools are useless, but vim is flexible and covers a lot of use cases. Half these examples are gui programs. Who is realistically trying to replace a presentation program with vim? These seem like strawmen to pad out the list. Is vim the right tool for every job? No, definitely not. But I think it does well enough that it's okay to lean on it if you already know it.

emresahin 2y ago

I set up F2 to run the shell command on a line in nvim, and I noticed it improved my shell productivity. I run tests with with cargo test, rspec, pytest etc by writing the command on a line, hitting F2 and all results are just there. I can navigate to errors, search traces or whatnot all the same as I navigate the code. I can search GitHub issues when I'm writing a commit message with gh. This is just a simple productivity hack that I can't replicate in other editors. I'm sure there are better special tools but vim is the most general purpose tool you can learn and use. I never had regrets to invest time on it.

andrewstuart 2y ago

I made the mistake of using vim before switching to an IDE. I bought in to all the tough guy talk and put tons of effort into learning the arcane key combinations and trying and failing to get plugins to work to make it do basic programming stuff. Utterly pointless - use an IDE - if you are a professional programmer it is the one tool you use all day every day, spend the money for the best one you can that has a team of people working on it full time, paid well to make that IDE awesome. I use vim all the time now for simple text editing when logged in to a machine but I'd never dream of using it for programming. I know how to cut and paste lines in vim and how to save and exit, nothing more needed.

PhilipRoman 2y ago

Ironically text editing is the thing I like least about vim. I would switch to an IDE if it provided the level of programmability Vim has. For example, I have a binding which, when used on a netlink command, opens the corresponding implementation in the kernel. How do you do that in something like VSCode? I guess I could write an extension, but in Vim it takes like 2 lines of code that you write once and forget about it. Or another example - you can analyze log files in terminal buffer by folding based on patterns, multi-color highlighting, etc.

phatskat 2y ago
The ability to quickly and easily(-ish) script vim is incredibly useful. At one point, because of environment constraints, the easiest way to run unit tests was either to run them all or to specify the file I wanted to test. A little bit of googling and playing around and I had Vim read my current spec name, chop it up to find the correct source file name, spawn a terminal and run the test command using that source name anytime I wrote a change. Thankfully I’m somewhere with sane tooling that watches for changes and only runs relevant tests, but back then this little foray into “how do I make Vim do a thing” saved me a ton of time.

lawn 2y ago

> While some recent advancements may hint at future changes in that direction, Vim currently lacks everything it would need to be considered/used as an IDE. I disagree. Neovim can be considered an IDE with the caveat that you have to configure it as such and use plugins. > From sketchy terminal integration What's so sketchy about it? The terminal integration in both Vim and Neovim are decent, and you can always do Ctrl+z to go back to your "proper" terminal and do whatever. > to being single-threaded Sure, everything isn't multithreaded although you can write asynchronous configurations and plugins. Regardless, Neovim is more than fast enough (and certainly much faster than the comparable IDEs) so I don't see the critique being valid. > via the lack of anything resembling a proper internal plugin API Neovim has a very good API for writing plugins in Lua. > nothing in Vim can be leveraged to give you a convincing Integrated Development Environment. That's just false and ignorant.

deleted 2y ago
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oswalk 2y ago

[dead]

daft_pink 2y ago

The real reason to learn vim is so you can login to any linux server and edit. You learn it and if you enjoy it you can go deeper. I use VSCode on my desktop and I’m not about to give up a graphical IDE, but it’s great to be able to ssh into any linux server or container and be able to efficiently edit with just a keyboard when you need to.

ggm 2y ago

If your finger memory is locked to hjkl and ESC, you probably have very little choice.

theshrike79 2y ago

How many 10+ year veterans of the software industry are actually only limited by their typing speed and need to maximise it with vim? I do kinda get the feeling you get when you can transfer your thoughts to screen as efficiently as possible. But really, if your typing speed is the only thing holding you back when coding, it's a bit suspicious to me.

fingerlocks 2y ago
Using vim to improve typing speed is an age old misconception, bordering on straw-man. The real appeal is the flexibility to script and customize a general purpose editor and make it bend to your will. For example, make a key binding that moves between only functions that have a particular signature. Or a shortcut that takes heap snapshots, filters and format the output to your liking, and have it displayed alongside the source file with the suspected memory leak your hunting. Otherwise no I still can’t get used to using j and k to move up and down even after a decade of vim.

jmclnx 2y ago

Least we forget, UNIX type systems is an IDE with many small tools. Plus you can batch up mass changes and run in background which you cannot do with an modern IDE. See Unix as IDE (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789528

k2m 2y ago

I moved to NeoVim recently and I never missed VSCode. Most of my development happens in remote machine and I found VSCode symbol look up, code navigation painfully slow and sometimes it doesn't autocomplete. When I update my repo, all linting and LSP features stop working in VSCode. In NeoVim, it happened 0 times so far. So, yeah, OP is wrong. VIM(NeoVIM may be) is as good as any other IDE out there.