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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

I've always felt vim is an excellent editing experience but a lousy project management (ie "IDE") experience. I've also grown tired of the song and dance of setting up vim config and plugins, getting excited when I finally get a decent autocomplete working without stopping to consider VS Code has great autocomplete out of the box.

The problem is vim editing never quite mixes well with other editors. The vim plugin for VS Code is great, but do you let it take over Ctrl? Do you get Ctrl-R for redo, and sacrifice other VS Code usages of Ctrl for example? The vim plugin is also pretty buggy here and there and no matter what, I always find a vim plugin is missing some vim feature I depend on.

It's frustrating in a first world sense. It's hard to have your cake and eat it too with vim.

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The real solution to this problem is for IDEs to support an editing frontend interface and then editors to be split into frontend and backend so that really you could use them in the context of the IDE.

The obvious example would be using the neo-vim frontend to interact with VSCode, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc.

What I want most is a Neo-Vim frontend to org-mode in Emacs, because it would be hilarious and because while Spacemacs is kind of cool it's still not Vim. And org-mode is awesome and unparalleled but vim > emacs all day.

That's what this project is working on: https://github.com/carlosdcastillo/vim-mode -- using neovim as the editing backend to Atom. It still doesn't completely solve the problem of vim and editor key commands clashing.

Another interesting approach is VimR (http://vimr.org/), which is Neovim combined with native IDE addons such as Markdown preview, file tree, etc. The nice thing about VimR is since the whole thing is one cohesive package, the developers can ensure it has a consistent experience. Sadly it's OSX only though.

that's exactly how limetext approached it. one back end, multiple frontends. I think that project is dead-ish though

This is basically what the language server protocol (https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol) is doing, just in reverse.

I agree. With the caveat that I'm not a vim power user, the IdeaVim plugin has worked well for me. It doesn't have everything, but I haven't encountered any annoying bugs while using it. Plus, IntelliJ / WebStorm do a lot of really powerful and convenient things. It has been a nice compromise.

Have you considered emacs + evil?

I think emacs falls in the same camp as vim in this regard. Setting up emacs is just as painful as setting up vim.

Check out spacemacs, it works beautifully out of the box.

Spacemacs is only good if you actually use it consistently throughout the day.

From the prompt, it is faster to open a large file in vim than emacs since you have to wait for all of the spacemacs plugins to load.

If you like searchable multiple-choice configuration, there's always customize.

M-x customize

That doesn't help emacs noobs at all. Half the Emacs term still used today 40 years after being coined don't make any sense. Wait - this is not the Window, but the... Frame? What?

Emacs terminology for the uninitiated. http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Emacs_Terminology

frame -> X window

buffer -> tab

window -> tile

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