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Comment by becquerel | Hacker News Reader

For me, vim is appealing because of the composable keyboard commands that let you navigate through text in a very powerful way. When you get good with it, it's way quicker than using a mouse. It also makes you feel cool, which is most important of all.

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You can install a vi emulator that does all of that in most modern text editors or IDEs, VSCode included.

"all of that" is a bit of an overstatement ime.

All modern IDEs have vim bindings.

My experience is that many of them are shoddy experiences. Some might be really good though.

Exactly. They all emulate up to a point, and that point seems different with every emulator. Then slipping out of vi mode to do something specific to that editor/environment ruins the flow.

Although the emulations are getting really good. For instance this [0] VSCode plugin isn't even an emulation. It embed neovim into VSC, even loads your init.vim file. Snappy too.

[0] https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim

I've used it quite a bit but I've had it desync from the server state somehow on multiple occasions making the experience not all that pleasant.

Better still, all modern IDEs have tools that actually work with code, not text.

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.

All modern editors (except Atom) do a substandard job of actually BEING Vim. And frankly, I don't believe being Vim should be a goal of other editors.

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.

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