I have an honest question, the real advantage of Vi is its installed everywhere, and just works over ssh.
What is the benefit of a terminal IDE like neovim or vim with tens of something plugins?
Vscode or other powerful IDEs do the work much better.
vim's "killer feature" is its text editing language and modality. But plenty of other editors and IDEs offer vim emulation to varying degrees of success. So this can't be the reason to use (neo)vim-the-binary as my editor over, e.g., VSCode.
So for me the real advantage of vim is in its flexibility. I can make vim into whatever I want depending on the context. Because of this, I'm able to use the same vim in many different contexts, instead of having different tools for different tasks. Ironically, this is kind of like the emacs culture of doing everything inside of emacs.
For example, vim is my code editor, of course. But I also have a keybinding to pop up my wiki and immediately start editing a note in vim. I have another keybinding I use when I'm writing a long piece of text in a textbox (like now) -- the binding drops me into vim, I write my text, and when I exit the contents of the buffer are immediately copied to the clipboard for pasting into the textbox. In each of these contexts, I have access to the same familiar environment with all of my configuration, keybindings, etc.
I could probably wrangle VSCode into doing each of these things, but it would be clunky. Vim owes much of its flexibility to its lightweight terminal interface. I wouldn't want to open VSCode every time I want to write a quick note, for instance.
The real benefit of vim vs any editor is modality and there is AFAIK nothing similar in any editor even with emulators. Editing/moving over text is just way faster with vim then any other editor (not just slightly faster, light years faster). I use vscode now because vim requires A LOT of setup and even when automated its pain in the ass. VScode and its plugin sync on the other hand makes it very fast to install anywhere with your config and keys so it compensate for slower editing to me since I need to have my editor EVERYWHERE (literary hundreds of computers).
Text? Yes. Code? No. Since editing moving code is a subset of refactoring, and Vim has no knowledge about code.
"varying degrees of success" is rather short of "sufficiently to not cause problems"; in my experience they're only good enough to get into the uncanny valley of "will this work" hesitation before every keystroke outside the most common.
Better to have specialised tools for whatever they are good at than a tool that's isn't good at any, and you have to spend time cmolding it to be a pale imitation of specialised tools.
> I wouldn't want to open VSCode every time I want to write a quick note, for instance.
Why would you open VSCode? You open a note-taking app.
What I stayed for, is how much closer to the "metal" it makes me feel. I started programming in IntelliJ, but using that I always wondered what was going on in the background. If I click on the green "play" icon, what happens? That magic is gone when using something like Vim without plugins. Configuring it to do everything you ever need yourself, however, can be quite a pain. So I gradually added plugins, to delegate the nitty gritty config work to plugin creators, making sure I understand what those plugins are actually doing, in order to not get back to a "I have no clue what my editor does" situation.
> Vscode or other powerful IDEs do the work much better.
The thing about Neovim is that this quote is becoming less true by the minute. Also, nvim can do some things that I don't think are possible in other editors. Have you tried embedding IntelliJ in your browser? :)
The difference for me, is that I only have what I want.
My requirements for an editor are:
1) Fast <- Most important 2) Autocomplete 3) Fuzzy finding 4) Prettier/eslint or equivalent
If I need to jump on a server, I do not suddenly forget how to use Vim without my .vimrc.
And navigating code is significantly fatser in an IDE than in Vim. This includes things like juping to definitions and implementations, finding call sites, fuzzy search on symbols (not text) and dozens and dozens of other things.
As someone who has to use IntelliJ when doing Kotlin/Java, I miss all the wonderful things that my Vim can do. Sure IntelliJ even lets me load my init.vim for maximum compatibility... and it's simply not that great.
Lastly, almost all modern editors suck down a ton of memory... whether it's Electron or JVM based. Sublime is an exception here.
You can speak that language in Vscode... kiiiiind of, just like you can speak evil to emacs. But these are dialects, vim is the real deal.
Neovim with a ton of plugins offers a lot of what an IDE brings to the table, and lets your fingers speak fluent vim at the same time.
So when you're randomly shelled in to some stock install that's got vi (realistically this is mostly vim but it doesn't have to be) you can keep speaking your native language for whatever text editing you might happen to do.
Also using IDEs vs text editors with plugins is a matter of preference (and flamewar) and I disagree with your last statement.
Better how?
As much as I respect VSC and IDEA authors - they are often 'too much' and too heavy. IDEA (and its children like Goland) in particular.
I've always thought this is a very silly reason to use vim, when almost any text editor can remotely access files via ssh, and FUSE tools like sshfs exist.
I use vim extensively as both an IDE and config file editor, but almost never actually run it remotely on servers. I would rather not lose my configs and have to have two separate sets of muscle memory.
I tried running it with neovim stable, but it always warned me that was unsupported and I got occasional bugs that required a VSCode reload. Thus, I’ve been on 0.5 nightly for a while. I didn’t know why the VSCode plugin demanded it. I think after reading this post, it’s the LSP support.
Ah and vim is text editor, not really an ide.
If I get on a linux machine other than my workstation, I'll generally not install any plugins and still be able to get the job done without getting frustrated.
Here's a list of more advanced functionality built into Intellij that would be difficult to replicate:
- Bullet-proof navigation and advanced refactoring that works every time across a wide variety of languages.
- Database integration: syntax highlighting for SQL code in strings, runnable sql, database introspection
- Debugging: consistency and polish across languages, not relying on external tools that might not be installed, visual debugger
Text-editors struggle with the "integrated" aspect of an IDE. It's not terribly difficult to coerce text editors to perform well for a single language. It's much harder to integrate plugins and provide a consistent experience.
There's good reasons to use text editors (learn how it all works, extreme customization, magit, lightweight) but there's many development tasks Intellij is just better at.
> Text-editors struggle with the "integrated" aspect of an IDE.
Neovim integrates a lot better with my terminal heavy workflows than IntelliJ does.