One reason is that IDEs' vim-plugins never work quite well. Another one is speed and resource usage. Resource-usage may be solved with thin clients, but not speed. Also I don't want to give up control to some platform.
Less is more. Tools should do one thing and do it well. I don't want to install a huge package and dependencies just to get one feature. Generally feel pessimistic about the "future" of IDEs. The phrase brings bloat to mind.
If I need the feature, let me add it to emacs. In most cases someone else has already provided a config.
That sounds like a good approach when you need 5 features. But for development the number is probably in the hundreds and I have no time to try to manage all that.
Besides many features are simply not available for editors like emacs. As an example, data flow analysis warns you about logical mistakes in your code (e.g. dereferencing nullable variable without a check first). This happens as you type, the closest you can get without an IDE is probably running it on some static analysis tool in your CI => getting feedback an hour later.
I think many vim/emacs users are not aware of the functionality of modern IDEs and development speed is mostly defined by text editing speed. Sadly, many users of sophisticated IDEs also are not using these functions, so the experienced vim user will likely be more performant than inexperienced IDE user.
I switched from Vscode/Intellij to Neovim +1 year ago and I couldn't be happier. I get why Neovim/Vim/Emacs is not for everyone tho.
There is way more to a fantastic language support in an IDE than symbol rename.
This is similar to MacOS/Windows vs Arch Linux. If you love building and tweaking things, custom builds to suit your needs, knowing every tool that is present in your editor and/or extending it, terminal editors and arch linux is for you, if you prefer something pre-configured that just works out of the box then IDEs and MacOS/Windows is way better ofc. But I don't think that we, the vim/emacs/neovim users, stick to our editors because we are not aware of the capabilities of other IDEs. We are very aware, we are very advanced users in most cases.
For example, when I was learning Clojure I used Doom Emacs for a few months, but gave up because:
- Emacs is slow. There's no way around that. It's even slower than VSCode or other IDE-ish editors. If you're used to Vim speeds, that's pretty annoying.
- The Vim keybindings are not available everywhere, for example in some plugins you would fall back to pinky-breaker, wrist punishing Emacs standard keybindings.
- There's some uncanny valley where keybindings are mostly like Vim but you have constantly paper cuts from small differences here and there, among the occasional Emacs-mode fallback.
Don't take me wrong, I can see how Emacs is a great editor, but for me, it's way too late it seems. Seems like I'm going to keep on vimming until the end.
If you really want to fix it, running the nativecomp version solves that issue.
Which maybe I will, because I hate Vimscript.
It can be, because it is :) If you want a really technical explanation, you can profile the application. If that is too much work, I'll generalise and say that the tendency for the UI to lock when performing CPU heavy computations makes it feel slow. Because of the things you will be asking it to do (i.e. solve modern problems), sometimes such computations exist and lead to blocks of 1s or more. That will never feel fast.
Booting up is normally not done so often, but also doing other stuff takes way too long for my taste (over the perceivable 300ms threshold).
> Emacs ran on hardware from the 1980’s. How can it be too slow on modern hardware?
Since then they've added millions of lines of ELisp code. The comparison is moot.
Also we are talking here about Emacs "distributions" (Spacemacs, Doom Emacs) which come with a lot of code, and ELisp is not particularly fast.
I've just tried Doom Emacs on 27.1, with the default stuff plus some minor additions, and it starts within 900 ms on my laptop (Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9850H CPU @ 2.60GHz).
HOWEVER, a heavily and naively reconfigured emacs, possibly with uncompiled elisp code and copy-pasted invocations that wait for network responses could take ages to open.
If you are finding emacs to be slow, try it vanilla first ("--no-init-file") before deciding it's the program and not your configuration.
I liked Doom as a vanilla editor, but I went back to vim.
For what it's worth `vim-iced` is pretty cool for Clojure. I didn't like Fireplace at all.
Org-capture, tramp mode, ansi-term. Tight integration with any workflow. Flycheck, flyspell, it’s all so good.
Much love for emacs. I would refuse to work where I can’t use it. Steep learning curve, but the view is beautiful after the climb.
I have a love hate relationship with vim. It's super fast and efficient to edit huge quantities of text, but as a tool to really understand a code base? IDEs reign supreme. This is coming from someone who steadfastly refused to use an ide until his last year of college, and then switched, being able to see call hierarchies, having smart completion, etc made my life much easier. I still fall back to the term and vim if I need something quick and dirty.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetlia...