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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

I don't know vi/vim at all (okay, only enough to exit an accidental session), so I can't judge the quality of these emulator plugins.

But I am curious:

On the Emacs side of things, none of the dozens of editors I've used that claim to emulate Emacs have done a good enough job to let me actually work. Right off the bat, most of them do not get C-U correct, and that's something any serious Emacs user will hit within a few seconds.

Do the 'vi' plugins generally do a good job, or are they just the same hollow key remappings that most editors consider "an Emacs mode"?

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I would say it depends. Mostly they enable the modal editing thing and most commands are available. However, what usually happens is that this integration is only skin-deep and there may be conflicts with the IDE's shortcuts.

In intellij, shortcuts (commands using a modifier) can either be handled by the Vim plugin or by the IDE. You can't choose depending on the mode of vim. I mainly use Vim for the movements, so I don't feel very limited by the lack of "advanced features". However, what irks me is the way words are handled. For exemple, the IDE will be able to handle camelCase and go from one "word" to the next with ^->. Vim doesn't know that.

Another limiting factor is that many people use a bunch of vim plugins. As the vim-mode in IDEs isn't actually vim, those plugins can't be used.

I've never tried, but what looks interesting on paper is the neovim integration of VSCode. From what I understand it actually uses nvim, so that should be able to provide the full vim experience, including plugins.

It's been a while since I last tried Vim emulation, so I don't remember the details, but I remember feeling impaired. :g and :v commands were missing, which is a big deal for serious vim users, I think?

Though comments under yesterday's post about scrollbars made me realize I might live in a :g/:v bubble :)

I am not sure. I probably don't know "vim proper" - only "portable vim" which is the same in all editors.

For the basic editing (probably not that basic, as I use quite advanced editing techniques like macros) I use vim shortcuts and for things like manipulation of windows/buffers/tabs I use editor specific shortcuts. Also for some unique features, like code refactoring in IntelliJ IDEs I use their shortcuts.

But "basic vim" functionality is still enough "to be dangerous" very fast after I start using an editor and I gradually learn the specifics. I never think twice whether I want to try some new editor. I just do it.

Indeed, I don't use vim proper (can't remember if I ever used it), but I heavily use all of the following (for different purposes) at the moment:

1. WebStorm for web stuff 2. CLion for Rust (it's different from WebStorm and has different shortcuts for various things) 3. Spacemacs for OCaml 4. VSCode for various things, mostly for beancount accounting 5. vim on remote machines - but there I don't use buffers and other more advanced things

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