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Comment by me_me_me | Hacker News Reader

That would be my advice, if you are comfortable with vim it will be a great tool for small to mid projects. Maybe even larger ones that are clearly modularized and kept lean.

But you cannot escape the reality, refactoring kinda needs a good IDE to get it done quickly.

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An IDE or the equivalent of an IDE implemented as a language server.

Using language servers make me wonder why it took so long to figure this out. Pretty much all IDEs are awful for text editing if you're a Vimmer but superior for the refactorings you're going to need. Programs like Vim are excellent text editors but JetBrains is never going to invest in VimScript.

I am occasionally frustrated that sometimes I am still forced to choose between one or the other because a lot of the servers are still in their infancy. Still waiting for the equivalent of Visual Studio 2019 as a language server that actually works with the projects I have to develop.

At least jetbrains has a vim plugin for all it's IDEs, you know?

There are still a lot of little differences which were fundamentally the reason I even switched to Vim in the first place. The tab switching and window splitting alone is something that drives me mad every time I have to use a Jetbrains IDE. Not to mention IDEs always insist on auto-formatting code while I'm typing it, which feels like using a site where the content jumps around because the ads are still loading.

Unless they fixed it in the last year or two, the interactions between JetBrains selection (necessary for a lot of the IDE magic) and Vim visual mode (what you'd actually use in the IdeaVim bindings) weren't always very predictable. That prevented the easymotion clone from working quite like the plugin, other things along those lines.

I found it to be a very good emulation of vanilla Vim, but also found when I was using Vim mode I hardly used any of the IDE features aside from passive JSDoc/outline/etc displays. That lack of integration between the two halves killed it for me, not to mention it'd been a long while since vanilla Vim was what I was really using.

I love the Language Server concept and hope that just becomes the thing going forward. There was never any reason specific language knowledge should be part of the editor, other than we didn't have a vertical enough ecosystem yet to coordinate a different way. Whatever else I can say about Microsoft, they accomplished that vertical pretty skillfully with VSC and TypeScript, and have been running with it like mad. I'm glad some of that has been to our general benefit.

The code is being auto formatted because you are writing it in a way that doesn't align with your formatting rules! :)

I think you can change that to only on file save, though.

In IntelliJ, it is possible to open the current buffer/editor in emacs using emacsclient. You can configure Tools > External Tools in the preferences. With this, you can have the same line number centered in emacs.

There could be something similar for vi too, though I have not explored this route.

Could this be a good compromise?

Language servers + vim are sometimes not as performant (or efficient) as an IDE.

Once, I tried replacing IntelliJ with vim + deoplete + a linter plugin (whose name I forgot), because Intellij ate my laptop battery too quickly, and because I like editing text in vim more than IntelliJ.

Well, the vim setup ate through it twice as fast, and was slightly less responsive.

You don't have to pick one. I write my projects in vim and keep the IDE open for when I want to refactor/debug. I'm not against using the IDE mind you, I sometimes refactor then keep on typing in the IDE. But I find myself naturally drifting back to vim when I'm just writing code.

(I'm also a firm believer in getting familiar with the default keybindings for any program, so I don't use any vim emulation in an IDE. There's value in learning a set of shortcuts that are usable everywhere)

I agree, there is no silver bullet for anything. Editors, languages, tools, cars etc.

Every tool has trade-offs, knowing how to use each and when to used them is going to help you work faster and smarter.

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