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Comment by lelandbatey | Hacker News Reader

There's really only one "class" of plugin that's a "must have" to turn Vim (Vim or Neovim) into an IDE replacement and that's some kind of Language Server integration; there are several you could pick, they all allow your Vim to automatically start and talk to a local Language Server, giving you all the fancy autocomplete/go-to-definition/inline documentation/etc that you expect from an IDE. Otherwise, I dunno, maybe a nice color theme? Probably the only one I really depend on that's not part of "general" vim is the FZF plugin, which lets me rapidly and quickly fuzzy search for files by their name anywhere in the folder I'm in.

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I use Neovim all the time but although I do have some linters installed I find all the fancy stuff so much worse than in a more visually appealing editor. I love vim and I do have a lot of affection for the terminal but things get extremely visually noisy with language servers in a way they just don’t with a more graphical interface.

It sucks because I want to use vim for TypeScript dev but I just can’t stand it compared to VS Code. For non-typed languages I still use vim, and I love how I can fluently edit anything on servers I shell into, but I kind of wish there was a middle ground of some kind.

Can you explain what you mean by “visually noisy”? If you’re referring to the diagnostics messages (virtual text and signs and such), that is easily configurable to disable (I would know, I wrote it)

I mean like all the stuff that displays in and around the code, that isn’t the code itself. For example warnings, hints, etc. An obvious example of something you can’t do in Neovim is display information in a smaller font. Generally speaking you just don’t have nearly as many options for creating information hierarchies in a UI consisting of ASCII characters.

In terms of turning things off, if you turn them off, then what’s the point of having the language server? (Not a rhetorical question - I would describe myself as a workaday programmer, not a master by any means.)

>In terms of turning things off, if you turn them off, then what’s the point of having the language server?

Code navigation and completion, for one.

But there are plenty of knobs to turn that provide a spectrum between “show nothing” and “show everything”. I also find the inline diagnostic text noisy, so I configure it to only show on the line where my cursor is. You can also use the “open_float” function to open the diagnostics on your current line in a floating window. That way you can leave them off my and simply view them on-demand.

You can use the vim extension for vs code, which let's you have your cake and eat it to. All the convenience of vs code with all the speed from using vim commands.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevi...

If you really want speed, you’ll want the neovim extension. This replaces VSCode in many ways, making it neovim under the hood…which means no waiting for VSCode to figure out what’s going on in your giant codebase, no wondering why it takes literally a full half-second sometimes before the characters you just typed pop onto the screen. But it’s still VSCode “on top,” so you can tap into the other features you might want when you want them.

Full disclosure: it’s been years since I used it, but I was super impressed

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