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Comment by elagost | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced that people who use solely vim/emacs started off before there were any good GUI editors and now have too much momentum. I'm not that old, but I frequently spend time on headless *nix boxes, so I use vim all the time and love it. I have a portable .vimrc that I take around with me because I have spent so much time that I want to configure things the way I like them.

Despite my love of vim, on the desktop, I fall back to gedit or Notepad++.

Vim and Emacs are great editors when you're SSH'd to a headless server, but they will not replace an IDE (or even TextMate). That is completely ridiculous.

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I'm the counterpoint to that belief. I started programming professionally in 2010, learned vim around 2012. My work environment was just better suited for a command line editor and it was nano, vim or emacs. Vim won. Since then, I'll have a constant itch to get vim bindings in whatever editor I'm using.

At the time I switched, I'd been using Notepad++ and loved it. These days, my graphical editor is Sublime (of course with vintage mode enabled).

Vim with just a handful of plugins is a complete IDE. Vim alone is an editor.

Vim was before my time, but I learned how to use it after seeing in videos how blazingly fast people could edit text inside vim. I had already put hundreds of hours into Visual Studio by this point, so I installed a vim emulation plugin and haven't looked back since. I've never used vim-proper as my daily driver, but I can use it well enough thanks to cutting my teeth with vim emulation plugins in more modern editors.

You know what's funny? ed is the standard text editor. Not vim. Not emacs. Not nano. ed.

So you should count yourself lucky that you can use vim on your headless servers -as I can, and I do count myself lucky, because I have seen the horrors of trying to edit files with ed, on Z/Os, inside TSO, on a mainframe. And it was not cute and cuddly like mistakingly retrieving xa! on the command line in vim and pressing enter, when you're not done yet with your changes and you don't have a copy. It was much, much worse.

I started programming professionally in 2015. I’ve tried all the “big name” GUI editors: Eclipse, IntelliJ, Sublime, Atom, Notepad++, VSCode. Now I use vim full time and I love it.

I grant that vim is not the most user friendly, but if you take the time to learn it it can do almost everything most IDEs do, including symbol based navigation, “fuzzy finding”, search-and-replace, etc. And that’s just native Vim — some plugins make these features completely comparable with (or better than!) IDEs.

I’m convinced that modal editing is the most efficient way to edit text, and vim’s biggest feature is how tightly integrated it is with the terminal. In a GUI editor, using a terminal means either using a subpar integrated terminal (like in VSCode) or switching over to my terminal emulator to run some commands and then switching back. Since I spend a lot of my time in the terminal, this is a big deal for me.

Really curious to hear why vim cannot replace an IDE or TextMate? Maybe it depends on your very specific use case? I certainly replaced my IDE(s) with vim and some plugins.

I'm a vim user, certainly one who was alive long after "good GUI editors." My first programming was done in Visual Basic over 20 years ago.

Using Eclipse, any jetbrains stuff, android studio, and xcode (even GNOME builder!) is super helpful for me. They have completion features, a robust set of build tools, and everything in one window with all the controls visible. I love the autocompletion, console, build environment, and when I think about the time it took me to get my .vimrc to where it is now, just for writing text and basic scripts, I shudder to think of how much I'd have to add to make it even close to something like Eclipse.

I am hobbyist programmer and a parent, so I don't get a lot of time to do programming these days. When I do I don't like fiddling my half-baked tmux/vim setup. I just wanna write code. So I use IDEs.

>I shudder to think of how much I'd have to add to make it even close to something like Eclipse.

It depends on what you use in Eclipse, really. But vim has plugins to do things like autocompletion, there's many ways to access console (:term), etc. It's all done through plugins, you just use whatever plugin manager to add them. It's very simple.

>I am hobbyist programmer and a parent, so I don't get a lot of time to do programming these days. When I do I don't like fiddling my half-baked tmux/vim setup. I just wanna write code. So I use IDEs.

Me too, but the day or two it took to get vim setup to function as an IDE also meant I had all the power that comes along with vim. For me it is well worth the time investment of a few hours for something I'll use for years and years and be more productive than using Eclipse. And allows me to go between my normal text editor and IDE and share all my keybindings and workflows.

I think a good trade off would be something like a vim plugin for Eclipse. PyCharm for example has IdeaVIM which is a plugin that brings a lot of the power of vim to that IDE.

I just couldn't give up all the power of vim just for the out-of-the-box IDE features like autocomplete when I can just add them to vim.

I started learning vim/emacs two years ago. I don't regret it at all and I use them both daily, even as IDEs. They're fantastic tools.

Hello my friend. I started using Emacs two years ago. Couldn’t be happpier. It’s an awesome a tool.

What features are you missing? Are there no plugins for them?

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