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Comment by _mayo | Hacker News Reader

> If you're using Eclipse or (god forbid) a text editor to write code, spend a minute and tally up all those 5-second chunks of your life you've spent this year looking up the names of variables, objects, whatever, and running into runtime errors from typos. Multiply by $$$/hour and see what you could have spent on a decent IDE.

This is a bit of FUD. There are plugins for most text editors that give them features that most IDEs have. For example, my Vim setup has tab and code completion, snippet management, syntax error highlighting in real time, code folding, document and file search, etc. I can also traverse a file faster in Vim than an IDE, my fingers do not ever need to leave the keyboard, and it's completely free (as in beer and freedom).

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I'm a hard-core emacs devotee since 1988, and I used to think the same way- who needs freakin' autocomplete? But a good friend made me try one out, and indeed, a decent IDE really does make a big difference in certain environments.

For example, being able to click through an entire app from Spring XML config, all the way through your own source code, into library files, and even the source for the JRE makes a huge, huge difference in productivity.

And languages/libraries/frameworks change all the time; the IDEs tend to follow these things closely. Having to maintain your own hand-crafted elisp (or whatever) takes a lot of work. I've been there, and I don't plan on going back any time soon.

For some reason, I use IDEs for Java and emacs for everything else. The only other area I find emacs lacking is web pages that mix languages (e.g. HTML/Javscript).

I use Vim and don't really need all the fancy code/whatever completion things, but how on earth do you get them? It seems complicated enough that I haven't bothered.

It's not to difficult, There are a ton of plugin's listed on the Vim site, and some on github. Most of them are just dropped into your .vim directory and some need to be set to startup in your .vimrc. Command-T(this one can acutally be kind of a pain to setup if your vim was not compiled with Ruby support), SuperTab, SnipMate are the three I recommend the most.

Thank you, I'll give them a shot now.

For something like on-the-fly highlighting of syntax errors it's usually just as easy as downloading the plugin and dropping it into your ~/.vim/ folder. For more some things you might have the extra step of having to remember a new command or keybinding, but that's about as complicated as it gets.

Emacs users should check out the flymake minor-mode.

ctrl-( p previous or n for Next) is built in auto-completion of what you are typing. It can be configured to use tags, files, only open buffers etc.

Ah, I do use that (rarely). I was looking for something more intelligent that might perhaps help with development, rather than with just typing.

You might want to look into Tags. They tend to be what gives vim its ide powers.

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