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Comment by zelly | Hacker News Reader

At this point honestly it's an objectively worse decision to not use modern IDEs. (It's not a matter of taste anymore.) IDEs have gotten really good. If you only use Emacs or vim, you're literally putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage.

All the avante garde language extensions (Rust, D, etc.) support VS Code better than Emacs now. VS Code is where all the new ideas are tried first.

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I've used both Visual Studio (not Code) and Vim and I have to say, the improvements over my Vim setup are pretty marginal for C++ code. Every time people come out saying you can't possibly be productive with Vim in <current year> it always feels a bit like they're projecting their own insecurities. All I really miss in Vim is good debugger integration, but so far I make do ok with plain gdb in a terminal. And this is a big enterprise codebase with ~150 developers working on it. It's perfectly ok to use whatever you like, I just don't see why you need to accuse perfectly good tools of inadequacy - you might end up turning away someone who would be most productive in vim/emacs vs IntelliJ or VS.

That said, VSCode has a lot of good ideas around tooling and I've been toying with the idea of looking into making a fork that replaces the editor component with an embedded NeoVim. I feel that would be the best of both worlds, but obviously a huge undertaking. There is already NyaoVim that implements a NeoVim gui as a web component.

I agree with your point about Vim being more than adequate for development in a large codebase.

I only learned Vim recently and I have hit no issues so far working on a large enough codebase such that navigation and autocompletion wouldn’t work effectively for any IDE.

I instead use cscope and ctags which allow me to selectively setup navigation and autocomplete from within Vim.

Regarding your last point: that already exists https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim

Emacs now has great support for Language Server Protocol, which provides you with basically all of the code intelligence that powers VS Code.

Objectively? Yeah I don't think so.

Could you give an example of how an IDE could make you much more productive than emacs?

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