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Comment by moring | Hacker News Reader

If IntelliJ was as fast as vim or VisiData, and as a bonus totally scriptable (I think it is to some extent, but just for fun let's assume you could change everything), which would you prefer then?

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The value of IntelliJ (in my opinion) is the deep semantic processing of the language you are using to provide useful information/refactoring/linting capabilities. It blows the equivalent LSP stuff out of the water (or at least it did last time I tried it with Kotlin).

As an editor, I really hate it coming from vim. Even with vim mode, it sits in the uncanny valley for me. It's pretty close to vim, I'd say 95% of the stuff works as I'd expect, but the last 5% is jarring. My biggest annoyances are:

* The undo behavior is insane, I'm constantly double-tapping u, because undo brings your cursor back to your last edit, but doesn't undo it. Unless your cursor is already where it should be, then it will undo. So it's uu then ctrl+r (sometimes).

* They don't have vim tabs (I don't think any modern IDE does). I'm constantly closing and reopening splits, it drives me crazy.

* There's no toggle fold, gotta explicitly unfold/fold. That muscle memory is stuck with me now, even in vim which makes me sad.

* Moving between the different panels is not the same as moving between different splits. You need to memorize the hotkey for each panel and then the hotkey to get back to the code, it feels extremely unnatural. The vim hotkeys are hit or miss in the different panels as well.

Despite all that, I still used it when I was working on a Kotlin codebase. I wish it was possible to extract their language processing stack and use it in vim to have the best of both worlds.

> * The undo behavior is insane, I'm constantly double-tapping u, because undo brings your cursor back to your last edit, but doesn't undo it. Unless your cursor is already where it should be, then it will undo. So it's uu then ctrl+r (sometimes).

This is a much better way than stock vim. In vim, if I scroll elsewhere and undo, it jumps back to the last edit and already undone the edit and sometimes I'm not sure what got changed but in IntelliJ it jumps back first, so I can see what will change before it gets undone and also I can just use 'u' whenever I want to go back to the last edit's position.

I guess it depends what your typical case for undo is. For me, 99% of the time I remember the changes I made an want to undo them, so pressing a button twice is annoying, especially since it's not consistent. If I don't remember what I was doing, then I can press ctrl+r to redo and see what changed, but to me that is the exception and I'm fine taking extra clicks to do it. Everyone has preferences, I wish this was configurable :P.

> also I can just use 'u' whenever I want to go back to the last edit's position.

I use ctrl+o for this.

If IntelliJ was as fast as vim, as lightweight as vim, preinstalled on every machine that I use, fully accessible over ssh, as scriptable as vim (or had perfect vim emulation as a plugin), free, I could install all of my preferences with just some dotfiles, and I need an IDE for the project, then I suppose it would just make sense to use IntelliJ at that point. Sometimes you just need a text editor though.

The new Fleet is supposed to be very fast. Haven't tried the beta invitation yet though.

https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/

I'm probably one of 2% of eng at my company who use vim instead of vscode, and not being able to run it in a terminal is the primary dealbreaker for me.

My dev workflow consists of 4-6 screen sessions with 3-5 terms each. Each one represents one "task" (usually a branch), and I use git worktrees to keep separate copies of the repo that are linked at the git object level. An IDE that insists on being a GUI makes me feel like I'm using a toy OS like Windows.

As a bonus, this is a remote-native setup, which made covid trivial to adapt to. I'm exactly as productive in the office as I am at home or on planes or in Ubers or at wine bars on sunny afternoons (modulo extra screen real estate).

Vim and Visidata. Emacs, actually. Open source rules all in my book.

IntelliJ is open source.

Sorry, wrong term. I meant FOSS. There is some software I can justify paying big bucks for (although the list is getting increasingly shorter thanks to better and better FOSS projects). But Emacs with zero licenses at all, and being the most customizable text editor on the planet? Vim, with the most innovative and speedy keybindings? What a steal.

Don't get me wrong, JetBrains has some cool stuff. It's nice to see they're working on a lighter-weight text editor to add some competition to the newbie-friendly text editor market. And JetBrains Mono is a phenomenal monospace font.

FOSS = open source :-P (the OS in FOSS is Open Source).

IntelliJ is open source/FOSS/FLOSS/Free Software, etc, here is the code[0], license is Apache 2.0.

[0] https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

Yeah, I know what FOSS stands for. I really, really commend JetBrains for having an open source edition. I just prefer an editor that doesn't separate features into pricing categories like Community, Ultimate, etc. I understand they have to make money as a company somehow, and that's totally fine. I just personally don't like the idea. Emacs does all I need, and more, with a single edition, and a single small fee of: zero dollars.

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