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Comment by cosmotic | Hacker News Reader

Have you tired IDEA (or siblings)? They focus on keyboard shortcuts and offer much more than vi can offer (full, integrated static analysis across with numerous languages and numerous context-sensitive tools like SSH, SCP, DB connectivity, etc).

I use IDEA and feel absolutely crippled and useless in vi. It's largely because I never use vi and don't care to learn it. I'm very impressed with the IDEA tooling. There's a vi plugin for it if you want to get a head start.

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IDEA has the lead on raw features (and integration, since all the core plugins are made in-house), but at least on macOS the editor performs like trash. There are hundreds of milliseconds' latency for nearly every interaction, and that's despite spinning up the fans and impacting the rest of the system. I'm not a latency-buff; I happily used Atom until VSCode came along. But IDEA is unbearable in my experience (again, I've only used it on macOS so YMMV).

There are known issues with scaled resolutions on macOS and JetBrains IDEs. If that is the case for you, using a tool like resolutionator to scale instead of the native macOS scaler, should solve the performance issues.

I wonder what makes the scaling in macOS difficult. For years Firefox would eat through my battery in no time if scaling was enabled.

It’s due to the Retina displays. The scaled resolutions don’t map in a clean way to pixels. The renderer renders everything at the native resolution of the panel and then has to downscale it to the scaled resolutions. For the “native” Retina view, it’s just /2, so it’s easy and pixel perfect. The others are more like /1.523134... and there’s more work to figure out what color each pixel should be.

I do use phpStorm for its interactive debugger during the rare instances that I need to. In any other language I would set a breakpoint and navigate the code from whatever terminal was running the code, but PHP is so awful that I can’t do that.

As far as IDEs go, I’ll give it 4 stars, but it still pales in comparison to writing VIM macros on the fly, jump-to movement keys, setting and jumping back to markers, being able to select lines in visual mode, pipe them out to any process I want and pipe the results back into my buffer, etc.

Running build tasks via clumsily configured toolbar buttons is absolutely horrid in comparison to make or any other CLI-driven build system that I’ve used (except maybe all the JS ones).

I think that depends what language you're using. IDEA is a must for Java, but vim with ccls works great for me on C/C++ projects and clion doesn't seem to do more there.

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