Comment by fredsir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredsir | Hacker News Reader

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> can benefit one a lot.

What are those benefits?

I tried to switch from vim to VSCode, and it just felt like it confined me. To be fair, I don't "run vim", per say, I run a shell with tmux inside, split horizontally in two, with vim on top, and two shells (a vertical split) underneath. The left shell on the bottom being used for miscellaneous things, and the right one running some kind of live code checking (with visual results also inside vim).

This setup works great for both c, c++, python, haskell, rust, node and any other programming environment I use. I tried getting something along the lines with VSCode, but it confined me, and it felt like it wanted me to do things "its way", instead of letting me decide what I have found out works through years of experimentation. It's the same with jet brains and xcode and visual studie... It doesn't let me do things "my way" but instead forces me to do things its way, which, if I may say, is highly inferior. I have tried their ways and it's not good.

Sorry for the rant.

> it felt like it wanted me to do things "its way", instead of letting me decide what I have found out works through years of experimentation.

Arguably that's not "your way" either but "vim's way", which you've adopted over those years of experimentation by force. Only now that there are alternative options which are equally as powerful is it apparent that there are other ways of doing those things.

I'd rather say it's the unix way. Check out this[1] screenshot. tmux, and inside is vim, git, and cargo visible. My work environment is based on simple primitives that are all able to be composed and set up to ones preferences.

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/A9b3izE

I mean, it sounds like to me vscode has nothing to offer you, if your desktop (i.e. what we see when we look at your monitor) remains so static (in a positive sense).

I find vscode more useful than vim because I can quickly and easily swap out the pieces of environment I need. Need a terminal real quick? Ctrl`, command, ctrl` again and poof it's gone, with nothing in front of me but my code. Need git real quick? Ctrl shift g. Need one more tab? Another? Ctrl \, and so on.

I usually work with three or for different files opened, some tucked away in a tab that I can quickly shift to when I need it. And when I need to get to my "wall o' terminals", I just switch to that workspace (gnome).

Whenever I watch the local vim lady do her thing, it's an entirely different workflow. Grepping across files, then opening one in vim so it just kinda pops up in a new terminal window. Doing a thing there, then closing it to go work in a different vim window... Admirable memory map of the code base and confidence to just close the file and move on, but not for me.

> I find vscode more useful than vim because I can quickly and easily swap out the pieces of environment I need. Need a terminal real quick? Ctrl`, command, ctrl` again and poof it's gone, with nothing in front of me but my code. Need git real quick? Ctrl shift g. Need one more tab? Another? Ctrl \, and so on.

I'm able to do all of these things too with my setup, although it's not vim driving my setup, it's tmux. Using just plain vim doesn't work for me.

> I usually work with three or for different files opened, some tucked away in a tab that I can quickly shift to when I need it. And when I need to get to my "wall o' terminals", I just switch to that workspace (gnome).

Most of the time, I have two files open too, sometimes three. I never use tabs for files though. If I need to work on multiple files, I have them all open in splits. Seems to work fine all the time. I use ctrlp to easily switch between buffers and files.

> Whenever I watch the local vim lady do her thing, it's an entirely different workflow. Grepping across files, then opening one in vim so it just kinda pops up in a new terminal window. Doing a thing there, then closing it to go work in a different vim window... Admirable memory map of the code base and confidence to just close the file and move on, but not for me.

Yeah, doesn't work for me either... My setup looks like this[1] most of the time, and I'm easily to add any and everything as I need it.

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/A9b3izE

> I'm able to do all of these things too with my setup, although it's not vim driving my setup, it's tmux. Using just plain vim doesn't work for me.

For a while I was running (g)vim8 with the built in :terminal - but I had some character issues with meta mapping (so typing tings like ~ on my Norwegian keyboard layout was a chore). Qt neovim didn't have these issues, whatever caused them - but I also switched back to a tiling wm (i3) - and I'm not sure if screen in neovim term really is better than a neovim on one side and a terminal w tabs on the other.

What I will say is that vim8 has a "better" terminal out of the box than neovim (that realized the idea first) ;in vim switching out of insert mode is easy and allows real nice copy to buffer - say to copy from a repl, and switch windows to paste into a file.

The limit of one (two) x11 clipboards is a bit of a pain, but with setting the x clipboard to default copy/pasting between vim and the rest of the world becomes pretty painless.

Anyway - point being, vim/neovim has great support for managing terminals - but I'm not convinced it's a great idea.

Yup, this is also my setup and workflow, and I also agree with what you say about VSCode feeling 'confining'.

This is probably just a matter of opinion/preference, but I feel like an editor should simply be an editor -and IMO there is no better editor for turning thoughts into code with minimal friction than VIM/Neovim. The OS functions perfectly fine as an IDE for everything else.

Could you expand on what "Your way" is? I really really like VSCode for Python and never had the nerve to learn VIM, so I'm wondering what you do that causes it to be a fight.

Well, the setup I mostly use looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/A9b3izE

I've tried getting something like that going in VSCode, but even just switching between terminals and compiling and so on is just too confining. Whenever I've tried, there's always some part of it that doesn't let me easily do something, because it expects one to use it some other way.

With a shell, tmux, vim and other CLI tools, it's all based on basic primitives that all function the same way and you can compose them as you like. It just works. You can't do that with VSCode or any other IDE. They all put limitations on you and if your preference doesn't fit its, you're out of luck.

This is pretty much why I haven't moved fully to VSCode as well. I gave it a try but I realized that my whole workspace is in terminal. Also, like you said the tools I have compliment to one another very well making it very flexible. The only thing I do miss when working in terminal is that whenever I'm working in markdown I wish it had dead simple preview like that in VSCode.

I do all my document-making in emacs with org-mode and evil (vim-mode). Seriously, it's amazing. When you are done, you are one command away from having it in markdown/pdf/latex/html/word or any other format you can imagine.

I'd love if I could have the same power for managing my todos, tasks, projects, taking notes, README writing, overall agenda with vim, but I can't, so I find it's easily worth it just to use emacs and org.

Here is an example of what you are able to do with emacs and org: https://imgur.com/a/3rTNVYE

And if you need it in markdown, you just manually export it, or set up a hook that does it for you every time the document changes.

And no, the result of the code-blocks in the screenshot is not something I manually inserted into the notes. Org runs the code and inserts the result for me automatically.

Okay you convinced me with that org-mode. I've already invested huge time learning vim and hopefully it translates well in evil.

Edit: Ah, I see emacs has it's own terminal which is why it was able to support charts and graphs.

I could never get used to NERDTree for navigating through my project. What plugin do you use for project navigation?

I use fzf[1] for all my project navigation needs. It integrates very well with vim. You can get a quick recursive look at everything in the CWD with a stroke of a key and the fuzzy matching is instantaneous.

[1] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

not op, but i use ctrlp.vim for everything. feels a lot better than most things.

Yeah, exactly. I use NERDTree for discovering new projects, but other than that, I use a fuzzy matcher for files and buffers. I used ctrlp for years, but recently switched to fzf because it's just faster.

Fzf and ripgrep <3

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