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Comment by asaddhamani | Hacker News Reader

I know right? I don't get all the hype, honestly. I've been using JetBrains products too, and they blow everything else out of the water. Even VSCode is good (though nowhere near as good as JetBrains, atleast in terms of Intellisense).

I tried looking into Vim / NeoVim a few times to understand what all the hype was about.

I had to install:

* Fugitive * Nerd tree * Airline * YouCompleteMe * Emmet

And I don't remember how many other plugins just to get a halfway decent editor experience. I get using Vim if you're SSHed to a server, but otherwise it feels like intentionally handicapping yourself. In case you find yourself needing keyboard based navigation, I'm pretty sure Command+P is much better than anything Vim could offer for quickly opening files, and there's a Vim plugin for VSCode for moving around in files.

I will probably get heavily downvoted for saying this, I know. But if someone feels like enlightening me instead, please do so.

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JetBrains IDEs are very good indeed, and if they (or VSCode) work for you, you should use them. There's some features in these IDEs that are better than what's available with vim/tmux, and the other way around. In either case, with sufficient motivation, any feature can be implemented in the terminal, or in a good IDE. It pretty much comes down to how much your workflows are remote-based, how tied-in you are to a terminal environment in general, and personal preference (like not wanting to touch a mouse).

If you're used to IDE's it's doubtful you'll appreciate vim by "trying it out" for a weekend. The learning curve is much too steep for that. Conversely, if you've used vim and terminal tools on a daily basis for >15 years, you probably won't have much motivation to switch to GUI-based IDEs.

I'd say you are focusing on plugins far too much before you've realised what Vim is even capable of.

I've been using (Neo)Vim for a couple years now and only regularly use 6 plugins that actually do something, and 2 additional ones for the eyecandy. All the rest is just a matter of knowing the features that already come in Vim, and efficient keybindings for them.

Also, Vim isn't something where you can just jump in for a test drive. You never stop learning Vim and it takes time. But once you get hooked you won't use any other editor without a Vim plugin, no matter where you end up eventually.

For me the hype is using the keyboard for everything, in the same way, regardless of platform.

That being said I have spent tens of hours trying to get everything just right in Spacemacs.. and some things dont work still.

this. i would seriously consider switching to jetbrains/vs code if kb-only navigation was possible. not just in the editor, but between all the integrated panes and menus too.

if this is possible... please teach me! i searched online and only found articles about enabling basic vim keybindings and gave up after that tbh.

Given that you installed Airline - which does absolutely nothing useful - I imagine you just got distracted by the red herring of people's lists of plugins instead of just trying to grok vim.

Airline's tabline extension is useful I think. Nice to have at least.

But yeah, airline is mostly just eyecandy.

“I tried looking into Vim / NeoVim a few times to understand what all the hype was about.”

Is vim really getting hyped anywhere? If so that must be one of the longest running hype trains in tech.

It's as hyped as tiling window managers.

It's there more or less all the time in the background. Every 2-3 years you'll see a resurgence in "Why I vim" posts. It's also part of the shell world. Usually it's tied to new waves of tooling...

* A new language or paradigm comes out

* Clicky tool makers (IDE, management software, etc) can't really keep up with the rapid change, and they aren't sure if this will catch on, so they don't make great tools for it. People have to use the cli tools to take advantage of all the features.

* Since folks are already in the shell, they want to make their environment better, so new folks are introduced to shell stack, and new customization options for tmux or shell or vim come out.

* Eventually if the thing catches on Clicky tool makers catch up and the shell scene quiets down a bit - people abandon shell stack for clicky tools if that's their preference, and the new shell converts integrate with the broader "shell folks community". (That community is always there, just quietly using the relatively stable interfaces in the background).

* At some point a new language or paradigm comes out...

> I'm pretty sure Command+P is much better than anything Vim could offer for quickly opening files

Actually, you're wrong here: https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim.

Actually you're both wrong ;)

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim

Fzf is an incredible fuzzy finder, integrates into your shell really well (history search is brilliant) and the wrapper in vim is lightning fast.

I used VSCode for over a year and recently switched to Vim.

Ctrl+P inside of VSCode is way way way slower than fzf with Vim. Even Ctrl+P with VSCode on a small amount of files had some amount of lag on it but fzf and Vim is nearly instant with thousands of files. There's also a lot of great fzf related shortcuts with Vim too, like being able to search more than 1 file with ripgrep or searching through lines in a file, etc.. All of which are super fast operations. I can search through a 900,000+ word markdown file (over 100,000+ lines) in Vim instantly with fzf's line searching tool.

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