Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

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You are doing it wrong. You start with a bare vim/neovim editor. Then you learn the basic keystrokes of vim and maybe adjust them a bit for your fingers. Then you add, for example, an autocompletion plugin or tool (there is COC.vim or native-LSP for neovim); then you add a theme; then you add a files explorer, etc...

This is done over the course of a "few years". I understand this is not an instant solution like an IDE is, but Vim takes a lot investment in terms of muscle memory or configuration to finally have a setup that "fits you". Once that happens, that's where Vim/Linux/your-shell will "click". You can't fit a mass-consumer IDE to your style, you have to "fit in". That's not the case for these tools.

Personally, my needs when editing source code are not unique enough to be worth spending a "few years" fiddling with vim when at least 80% of my needs are covered out of the box with an IDE. Not to mention that I only spend a fraction of my development time actually writing and editing source code.

This is why it's optimal to avoid copying some vim ninja's ~/.vimrc because if you do it's usually too much to process all at once, especially how it differs from the default.

You're still "fitting in" to a workflow with Vim, and one that's arguably suboptimal if your setup would benefit from the kind of computer aid to software development that an IDE would provide out of the box. IDE's are not perfect by any means, but they're better than something that got started as a trivial 'visual' mode for ed (a line-based editor) to make it more useful on glass teletypes.

With coc.vim/Native-LSP I hardly feel the need for an "IDE" experience. I had troubles (and almost switched back) with autocompletion and syntax detection before LSP but now I think it's at par with most IDEs.

Congrats on autocompletion and syntax! Now do visual debugging, safe refactoring, type and parameter name hints shown inline, and package management. The first 3 are used on daily basis, the last one maybe once a week.

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