Hacker News Reader

Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

I rarely ever use actual vim, mostly when I'm in the terminal. But I have vim plugins for most IDEs I use (VS code, intellij, XCode). It makes editing so much faster. When I have to get by without it I feel as if someone put weights around my wrists. The reason I don't use Vim is because it's frankly not a smooth experience for most languages (unless you fiddle around a lot, and even then I found Ide+vim plug-in superior). I do hope Neovim will solve this, though I didn't test it because the last time I checked windows support was experimental.

View on HN

After a several month effort to learn vim bindings and use them full-time, I eventually ended up weaning myself back off because the plugins for the editors I actually use all seemed to come with considerable downsides.

vscode-vim caused odd performance issues, and I encountered significant bugs with the undo stack (namely hitting 'u' would sometimes take out the last 10-15 changes instead of just one). IDEAvim would randomly go completely unresponsive for me, sometimes requiring just re-opening the file and sometimes requiring a restart of the entire IDE. And last I checked the Xcode plugin requires re-signing the entire binary with a self-signed certificate because the new plugin system won't support modal editing.

I was quite happy with neovintageous in Sublime, as well as Sublime's excellent performance in general, but no matter how many plugins I installed it could never seem to come close to the smarts of the other tools I was using.

Ultimately I just arrived the the conclusion that I'm never going to be happy with any editor and decided to make the best of what I could with a consistent set of keybindings across the tools I use.

That said, every time I edit my hosts file or something on a remote server and reach for vim, I wonder if I made the wrong choice. I'm really hoping Language Server Protocol becomes the standard and we reach the point where it no longer matters what editor we use.

You should take a look at language server clients for vim e.g. coc-nvim. I don't personally used one so I can't say what works or not.

[0] https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim

I did actually give coc-nvim a try, and while it was effective for JS and Vue (the primary things I use VSCode for), I’m yet to find anything that can convince me to drop PhpStorm or Xcode for their respective specialties. So unfortunately it only solved about 1/3 of my problem.

I use coc-nvim and can attest that it is really good. I used to use YouCompleteMe, and while that plugin is really powerful it's also overly complicated and breaks a lot.

I too have been down this road. I tried Atom for a couple of months, and that turned into a couple of years. I had it tuned into a VERY NICE Vim. I tried out VSCodeVim and got it to be a mostly passable Vim. It sure is pretty though. I'm back on nvim for the time being. Coc.nvim and LSPs make it pretty good. There are definitely rough edges and memory usage is pretty bad with all those plugins, but. I know it, I feel right at home with it. The only other two editors I invested any real time learning were Sublime and Emacs (I did not try to turn them into Vim - but I did end up installing Evil for Emacs later on)

I'm pretty broken by Vim. I don't really want to invest the time to get really good at a non-modal text editor.

I experienced issues with the VS Code plugin as well, though not as severe as you described. If I had the same issues, I wouldn't use it as well. I haven't experienced any issues ever with IDEA vim. I haven't used XCode in a while, so I can't chime in on the current state of the plugin. My ranking for most stable to least stable plugins I've used would be the following (in case of multiple plugins, I don't recall the exact one, sorry):

- QT Editor - Eclipse - IntelliJ - Visual Studio - VS Code - XCode

At the moment I mainly use VS Code, and I'm still editing much faster, despite the issues (occasional undo hiccups and error messages).

I just wanna give my 2c in that after some years using vim I've started using vscodevim and I just love it. Perhaps it helps that it happens to match my vim config pretty closely (surround, easymotion, + language plugins and stuff such as ctrl p that is native to vscode).

Reading about that undo bug gave me a knot in my tummy. Damn.

If it is any consolation, as a VSCodeVim maintainer, me too. We had some issues at times, a lot of them have been resolved, but that first impression is impossible to get back. Contributions have dwindled from people and I feel like it needs another kick to make it perfect.

Thanks for your work!

FWIW, since recently (can't tell you which version, but maybe a week or two back), my editor has become real unresponsive (2-5 seconds delay when I switch from Insert mode) and if I type before it switches, keystrokes get inserted as text.

If it’s any consolation, Ctrl-R will redo those same fifteen changes, so you won’t lose any work. And the vim extension’s undo history is separate from the editor’s so you can’t really lose any work accidentally.

Yup. I had the same issue with vscodevim which causes me to ditch vscode entirely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com