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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

I gave up trying to make Vim into an IDE. It's a text editor. It's an excellent one, but that's what it does. The plugins just aren't very good. NerdTree is not a good file browser. None of the autocomplete/intellisense works very well. It does work, but requires a lot of setup, and let's be honest, a TUI isn't the best way to interact with autocomplete dropdowns.

Most of the IDEs have vim like features or plugins. It works a lot better the other way - make your IDE into Vim.

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I've never liked nerdtree, everybody seems to suggest it but I never saw any utility in what it does. Why would I want a filebrowser taking up an entire window in vim when I have wildmenu command line completion for :e and, for deeper directory trees, fzf (although I only started using that recently, nerdtree never made sense to be before then either)?

I do wonder what your gripe with the autocomplete dropdown is though, vim's built in TUI completion dropdown (this isn't something plugins invented, it's in Vim by default) seems to work just fine for me. The only completion plugin I use is supertab, which I understand to be dated and out of vogue these days, but it gives me continuity with command line completion being triggered by my tab key. The dropdown works exactly like I'd expect it to; tab and shift-tab to cycle up and down, and enter to select a completion. If I continue typing with it open, it refines the suggestions on the fly. I'm not sure what else I should ask for.

Text editors and IDEs are quite different.

For everz we've ben trying to shove one into the other.

Every IDE has a sort of shitty text editor.

Every text editor tries to make a shitty IDE.

Can someone please ackgnowledge that the reality is that neither is a good approach? I wish that I could have complete integration between VIM and JetBrains suite. Would be nice if the JetBrains platform could render a VIM inside itself as the actual text editor but kept 100% of its features as vim plugins to be installed. That way nobody has to re-invent the wheel on great text editing (emacs falls into this category too) and actually making intelligent IDEs.

This is the goal of the Oni project, but it's still early in development and there's lots of work left to do. Yes, it's electron but in my experience it never uses more than a few hundred MB of ram.

https://github.com/onivim/oni

Oni is my current text editor, and even though it's pre-1.0, it's been a fantastic experience. It starts fast, looks great, works perfectly as a Vim (it supports standard Vim plugins), and requires almost no configuration (I don't know why the built-in Prettier code formatting is shipped disabled, but you should turn it on).

Neovim promises to close the loop and finally bring balance to the world, but whether or not those lofty goals are realized in practice remains to be seen.

https://neovim.io/doc/user/msgpack_rpc.html

I totally agree that the plugins aren't great.

I never was able to leave VIM though. The reason is that it works so well over SSH and I don't like the context switching from VIM to IDE.

Also IDE's always end up crashing or lagging at some point. When you're in the coding mindset this can really upset me greatly.

What IDE do you use?

I use Visual Studio. It's free now and I've been using it forever, since it's first release.

Vim is one editing interface in the IDE that is UNIX.

I've tried using vim plugins with different editors before, but they're always missing a few of the shortcuts that are in my muscle memory and drive me crazy.

Also, being able to ssh into any machine and remotely edit code is pretty awesome.

The biggest thing for me when trying to switch from console vim is `alt + <key>` will send ESC and the key, so you can use alt to exit insert mode and send a command at the same time. Doing alt+j or alt+k has become the way I always leave insert mode (or command, or visual).

Unfortunately most IDEs that have vim keybindings don't support this, and it has become such a baked in part of my muscle memory that it makes switching to anything else such a pain.

Many of them fail to implement macros in my experience. Though I've heard VSCode got this part right.

The most productive vim keybinding I ever came across was:

    noremap <Space> @q

Since the key to start a macro is q, you can quickly tap qq to record a macro to the q register (end it by pressing q again.) Then by whacking the space bar you can execute the q macro as many times as you'd like. Once you get into the rhythm of using it often even for small tasks, it can become a great optimization. Sometimes I use it with five or more different macros in a single minute. If you ever look forward in time and see that you're about to perform the same edit two or three times, pressing the q key three times total and the space bar once per execution (or only once with a count) will often be fewer keystrokes than had you performed the edit manually each time. Not to mention triumphantly smacking the space bar to repeat an edit is a great feeling.

(Simple edits can be repeated using . which is another indispensable vim feature that sometimes gets missed by vi-plugins in other editors.)

Since <space> is some peoples' leader key (not mine, but I see it a lot), just throwing it out there that `Q` is a fine alternative for that mapping too. It's also a nice semantic companion to `qq`! ...unless you are a heavy ex-mode user, of course :)

If you want a "file drawer" that is always open, nerdtree ain't great, but furthermore, the whole "file drawer" concept doesn't really work in vim. I personally prefer nerdtree to the builtin netrw but the "killer setting" for me is "close nerdtree after opening a file". nerdtree is super useful as a tree explorer but you'll have a much better time if you don't treat it as a "drawer".

Vim for me is an editing style. It's more powerful than using arrow keys/alt/ctrl for navigation. Wherever I edit, I just need that editing style.

The vim editor gives you only the editing style. VS Code on the other hand gives you that editing style (arguably less powerful, but good enough for my needs) plus a whole lot of other things without much configuration. I'd choose VS Code anyday

Did anybody find a decent way to get VIM mode into Eclipse IDE? I tried Vrapper and Eclim. Terrible.

I gave up too: I wanted to replace Eclipse with gvim but vim doesn't use efficiently multiple tabs by default and it would take a lot of configuration to change this..

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