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Comment by BadassFractal | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works on large .NET / Java / RoR projects, would I gain anything from switching to vim from say, VS 2010, Eclipse and RubyMine? I'm quite used to relying on visual IDEs, but if vim is supposed to make me incredibly productive then I'd certainly like to explore that option.

Anybody here made the switch and felt it was worth it?

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The one thing that made me switch was the many different text files I was editing. vim makes editing text files very easy and there almost always a syntax file for the type of file you are editing.

I use vim so that even though I may be editing C++, Ruby, YAML, JavaScript, Python, HTML, and CoffeeScript in the same day, I can still use the same editor and shortcuts across all the different types of text files. Also, vim is always one of the first editors to get syntax files for a new language.

If you only do ASP all day, VS is worth sticking with.

There are tradeoffs. In my opinion, the text-editing advantages that vim gives me greatly outweigh the advantages that an IDE has over vim. If you haven't used vim before and you switch now, you will not see it as a favorable tradeoff for a while until you get the hang of it. Using vim for all these things requires a command-line friendly mindset for all of the non-text-editing tasks like building, running, searching directories, etc. Really it's not IDEs versus vim, but rather IDEs versus vim + command line.

Some things I give up to use vim over IDEs:

* A nice graphical debugger

* Superior support for symbol lookup (ctags isn't perfect)

* Superior support for autocomplete (given the above)

* Automagical refactoring support (I think these features are way overrated, and many of the most common edits fall under vim's domain)

* Boilerplate generation (even given the copious amounts that Java requires, I've always thought that this was a code-reading problem rather than a code-writing bottleneck)

* Compiler errors as you go

* WYSIWYG GUI design (you could just fire up the IDE when you need this anyway)

Is it possible to have it all at once? Would a plugin for VS/Eclipse/whatever like the other poster suggested allow you to use a vim approach with all of the benefits of a cushy IDE?

I have a feeling that once you learn vim, you'll want this plugin, because it will be infuriating not to have it once the muscle memory is in place. However, I doubt you'll find it even remotely useful unless you've put in the time to learn vim on its own.

I actually just made somewhat of an opposite transition. I've been an Emacs guy for a while, and just started using a visual IDE. There are certainly things I like about having an IDE, mostly when it comes to building projects, browsing code, and doing GUI stuff.

However, when it comes to doing some real coding, I always go back to Emacs. After learning a really good text editor, you don't even have to think about doing complex things with the text, you just get into a zen mode, and the cursor does what you want. Combine that with easy access to any shell/interpreter you're using and it makes for a very productive way to just write some code.

You'd possibly be better off using one of the plugins that adds vim style commands to visual studio.

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