Comment by arnvald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arnvald | Hacker News Reader

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I sometimes find myself on the other side. I've been using Vim for close to 10 years. I rarely edit my .vimrc file now, mostly when I want to try out some new plugin or I'm using new library and want to improve some shortcuts.

From time to time I try to switch to IDE or another editor, but I easily get lost. I work on a big screen so I want to split my window into 2/3/4 parts to see multiple files next to each other. Vim has built in shortcuts for that and in my vimrc I added 2 lines to make custom shortcuts that are even simpler. How do I do it in Intellij? The most common way is to use mouse, which I find annoying since with Vim I'm able to use keyboard 100% of the time. There's also a way to add shortcut for that, but it's buried deep into settings (Settings -> Keymap -> Main menu -> Winddow -> Editor Tabs -> Split vertically / Split horizontally).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that what you consider "poor version of (...) functionality that comes out of the box with the most basic of IDEs" is enouh for me, and I've been coding in multiple languages over the last few years. On the other hand in other editors I have to slow down my development due to lack of good editing shortcuts or I have to invest significant amount of time into making sure that I can recreate these or similar shortcuts.

Wait... You said you had to edit 2 lines of a config file to add shortcuts, so that means you have to know what file and the syntax. But, opening a menu and clicking "keymap" to add a shortcut is too hard?

The OP's config files are probably synced across all the servers and workstations they work with.. This is probably done using a familiar tool the OP already knew.

The IDE's config might be synced. If it is it probably uses a proprietary server.

I said that Vim has built-in shortcuts for that (from what I know, Intellij doesn't) and I added custom ones because I wanted a simpler one. It's a fair point that editing a config file might seem way more complicated than modifying settings in IDE, however now that I learned about existence of config file and a command to add new key mapping, I can customize every operation I use, while in IDE I have to look for a proper setting every time.

You can easily incorporate the most widely used vim commands and shortcuts (including window splitting) in IntelliJ/PyCharm by installing their vim plugin.

You are then left with choosing between the comfort of using the subset of vim that isn't available through the plugin, and the comfort of using all the IDE features that aren't available in vim. I believe that for most people the latter will be far more productive.

It's possible, it also might be a matter of preference. I find it hard to become productive with other editors, although I appreciate some features there that are hard to achieve in terminal Vim. It might be true that for most people it makes sense to user other editors. It's also possible that VSCode or Intellij make you productive immediately, but if you decide to learn and configure Vim, with certain time and effort you might beat that productivity. The latter seems to be true in my case, but I don't want to claim that it's a universal thing.

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