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Comment by maccam94 | Hacker News Reader

Language Server Protocol plugins are adding functionality for completion/docs/refactoring these days, and vim-jdb looks pretty decent.

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I feel like I need a PhD in configuring vim to do that stuff. The fact vim has been around forever and still hasn’t caught up with an IDE for ease of use doesn’t convince me at this point to use it for coding Java. Eclipse/IntelliJ is simple download and everything ready to go, git integration, all kinds of auto complete , debugger, etc... you hit the ground running pretty much. Can’t say the same about vim for Java, but think it’s fantastic that progress is being made to close the gap. Now where’s the simple one line config command to get me started ;) ....

I don't see there's a reason to use vim locally as other editors are far advanced when vim isn't changing at all. But there's a use on the server side because you only have vim or emacs there.

As someone who's been doing sysadmin-ing things for a while... (10+ years) I don't think I've ever seen Emacs installed on any server where it wasn't maybe pulled in as a dependency by something else. Emacs is almost never installed by default, you could instead install micro (https://micro-editor.github.io/) instead, use normal keybindings, and call it a day :-)

> As someone who's been doing sysadmin-ing things for a while... (10+ years) I don't think I've ever seen Emacs installed on any server

Chances are the Emacs-users are working on files on that server remotely via TRAMP, from their nicely and 100% personally customized Emacs-installation.

Why bother replicating all that setup on a server when you don't have to?

True, but that also means that as someone who regularly SSHes into servers, you don't need to learn anything about Emacs. For local stuff on the servers, vi(m) is always there (https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/v...), for remote operation you can use any other editor ranging from Emacs + TRAMP to VS Code + remote extension to ...

Since Vim/NeoVim take a "batteries not included" approach to set up I'm just happy that we've gone from a state of "you have to use an IDE to get code aware features" to "it's hard to set up code aware features in NeoVim".

Hopefully other projects such SpaceVim or individual plugins can provide an easier path for those that want it. I think it's on NeoVim's own road map to add LSP support out of the box.

Of course it's also worth pointing out that whilst it's nice that NeoVim is learning new tricks nothing about having better CLI based tools available means that you can't still use GUI based IDEs if that suits your use case better.

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