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Comment by PestoDiRucola | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to be flamed or start a debate about the values of one or the other, but why should someone in 2021 go through the hassle of setting up (neo)vim or any other terminal or barebones editor (looking at you emacs) when there's perfect solutions out there that work out of the box with a lot of features that neovim has. For example VSCode uses LSP "natively" and even has an excellent vi emulator you can install as an extension.

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1) That sweet sweet feeling of feeling different. I've come to accept that part of the reason I use linux and vim is I derive some satisfaction from being "hipster". But not enough to say, use gentoo :)

2) Simplicity. Even with all my vim plugins, I never have issues with "IDE hogging all my ram" or "intellij crashes when loading a working set including this commit" (it worked for me...).

3) Ease of access. When remoting into my boxes, I can just tmux attach and continue editing where I left off, even on a shitty connection (using mosh). Very useful on train/conference wifi.

In the spirit of your first clause, these are personal reasons that work for me. I have not listed the cons, of which there are many, and don't expect my reasons to apply universally.

sometimes you do work right in a terminal.

I use Sublime for almost everything, but sometimes I edit code I have on some servers where I don't want to manage a whole git repo and do pushes/pulls. I have vim and a .vimrc on those -- I could imagine replacing them with neovim if it had something shiny enough.

I also sometimes end up just popping open a file locally, e.g. a config file or a one-off script, and I don't want another sublime window for it. I think I may even have less bound to open up vim, for syntax-highlighting reasons.

I'm not saying other people need to do what I do, just explaining that some folks like me like good terminal editors, even if we've moved a lot of daily driving into other applications.

Vim does not spy on you and does not lag when pressing buttons. Why use inferior Microsoft products?

You appear to be 5-10 years out of date. Typescript, VSCode, Lean, are all "microsoft products", and if you think they are inferior you'd have to explain that view to a lot of well-informed people. Even LSP -- the basis of sanity in modern text editing -- originates and is stewarded by Microsoft.

Edit: Microsoft also funds some of the work on the Haskell compiler as I understand it. On the other hand I unfortunately now have to use crap like Outlook and Office 365 at work, so it's not like I don't understand the dismissive "inferior microsoft products" but we really can't say that any longer when talking about development environment tooling (which is what TFA is about) and programming languages.

Without going deeply into it, I think that characterizing Emacs as a "barebones editor" is deeply flawed.

I switched from Emacs to VSCode because I liked the feel of the more modern UI, but it certainly wasn't because Emacs was less good as an IDE. I can't think of anything I do in VSCode that I didn't have configured in Emacs.

Before I learned to use vim (neovim), I used VSCode. I tried to use the vi emulator extension in VSCode, but found it difficult to use due to hotkey conflicts, like trying to do something in vim but it's already a VSCode hotkey that does something else. The "hassle" of setting up Neovim really isn't that bad, and I'm very happy that I've been able to set up a customized experience that's contained in a single dotfile.

- I think VSCode is a great piece of software until my it starts using most of my laptops resources and my fan kicks in.

- I do a lot of work in a terminal. VSCodes terminal support is pretty bad. It might be better when they get nicer terminal tab support (not what they recently added)

- vim + terminal is considerably lighter and faster

VSCode has pros and cons, it has a nice web compatible view for multimedia. VSCode doesn't even support printing, which is weird. It's a memory hog and slow to start.

I agree and that's why I use Emacs. It's perfect out of the box for me. I may not even use external packages if eglot gets merged in.

> VSCode uses LSP "natively“

What do you mean by this? Is it some kind of same address space thing rather than LSP servers over sockets?

I thought they meant as opposed to, say, emacs where the LSP client has to be installed as a 3rd-party package (eglot or lsp-mode). As you say, the server is in a different process by definition of LSP. I don't know vim but from skimming the article it sounded like, until neovim 0.5, for vim one also had to install the LSP client as a plugin. In VSCode in contrast, the LSP client is native in the sense that it is built into VSCode. That makes a big difference from Emacs at least, because the LSP clients (eglot at least) are still under heavy development.

Means you don’t need a plugin. Which is apparently a big deal to some people. Maybe the don’t know how to install plugins...

Using a modern IDE after tunning and mastering vim command and modes for years is a real struggle.

Personally I find that for every feature that works out of the box there's two others that don't do what I want the way I want it. So I like my tools to be hackable. This does take time, and I admit I'm not always on the right side of the time savings chart[0]. ;) But I also generally find it satisfying -- tastes will differ on this point.

[0]:https://xkcd.com/1205/

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