Hacker News Reader

Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

If you are a professional developer, and plan to be working for several decades, is it really that much of an investment to maintain your editor config a la vim or emacs? I did a lot of work setting up vim 10 years ago, and have only had to tweak it since. It works exactly as I expect, anywhere, in a terminal, for free, and setup is as easy as checking out a repo and running a script.

JetBrains is good for stuff I rarely do in the editor, like certain types of debugging, but otherwise feels too heavy, expensive, and hard to configure across installs. Finding a particular config option is always a hunt.

View on HN

Honestly yes, I would rather pay someone to do it than maintain it myself especially across languages it just becomes a real nightmare. I need text editing, jupyter rendering, sql client, csv spreadsheet rendering, vim keybindings, git client, terminal/ssh, autocomplete, documentation tooltips and “run highlighted in repl” support at a minimum. These are all part of my weekly workflow, I have tried to use spacemacs because the community has setup a lot of this stuff for you already but the autocomplete is not comparable to VSCode or Jetbrains.

My dad was a vim user since the 90s and he ended up switching to IntelliJ a few years ago as well. It’s just significantly less hassle and has way more intelligent intellisense/autocomplete.

I have only recently tried GoLand while living in vim for ~5 years. IMO vim's autocomplete is significantly better than GoLand. Not saying the rest of the auto-insert helpers, but the completion itself is way better imo.

GoPLS is honestly really good, and while I haven't tried GoLand myself, I have no trouble believing you. Even rust-analyzer beats IntelliJ Rust IME. I'm very bullish on language servers because these two (and ElixirLS, though it isn't on the same level as GoPLS and rust-analyzer IMO) are countering the common assumption that you need an IDE to have powerful dev tools.

My experience is absolutely the opposite, especially on complex Go projects with multiple modules. I haven’t given Rust Analyzer much of a shot, but admittedly that might be better. Many of the projects I’m working on right now build using Bazel, and gopls has serious issues there even in generated code with a package driver configured.

I used to meticulously maintain a vim config for the 8 or so languages I switch between, but eventually realised that for me the good part of vim is modal editing, and that IdeaVIM gives me that without having to fuss with it. My vimrc is now empty and it’s relegated to commit messages and fixing merge conflicts…

Quick tip: you can sync config across devices using File > Manage IDE Settings.

One option is to use their sync service with your Jetbrain account, but you can also use git[1]

It definitely makes it easier to move machines when your settings and plugins are kept in sync with it.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/sharing-your-ide-setting...

I'm constantly surprised that people have trouble finding things in JetBrains IDEs, because they have search everywhere, for everything. You can even look for "actions" in the double-shift menu: just press Cmd-Shift-A (I suppose Ctrl for Win/Linux) and type a few letters. I found that way easier than figuring out how to configure vim, because there is no discoverability from inside the editor itself, and I frequently had to google several times before I found a way to get the behaviour I wanted. This gets even worse when you're using plugins for LSP etc.

(Emacs, of course, has best in class discoverability via M-x and C-h, which allow you to find and introspect basically everything that's available to you, but then Emacs is an OS, not an editor)

> Finding a particular config option is always a hunt.

Do you know you can search for an option in the settings menu? Actually, you can search just about everywhere.

You can also set your IDE to store your config in a git repo so that it's the same everywhere you use it.

> I did a lot of work setting up vim 10 years ago

Apologies if you have accessibility needs and that’s the reason, but otherwise what is so unique about your editing requirements that requires such extreme customisation? I just use tools as they come. I try not to change anything. Less entropy in my life.

You can't possibly call yourself a "professional developer" (and it sounds like you're not pointing out that you're paid for the work, but that you're a "pro") and then talk about debugging as something you rarely do. If debugging (with a debugger) is something you rarely do, you may be paid for your work, but I wouldn't call you a pro.

You should be debugging alongside development to gain deep understanding and reduce errors. No amount of "test" coverage can replace that.

I'm always skeptical about people who don't use IDEs and I'm almost always right about them. And it's not the good kind of being right.

That’s funny, because I’m always skeptical about people who fire in all judgy about the way other people work when they know literally nothing about who they are or what they do, and I am always right.

I think that parent’s point was that debugging is an exceedingly powerful tool, and therefore leaving it out of your toolset by definition makes you less powerful as a programmer. It’s not even such an esoteric skill - operating the simplest kind of a GUI debugger is maybe learning 5-6 different actions, and the IDE often takes care of the details of setting up the debugger for you.

On the contrary, I find a common debugger (see questions below) an underwhelming experience, not a powerful tool.

Can it:

- assign (scenario, subsystem, level, description) to breakpoints and watches, so they can be turned on/off or selected in groups for debugging without removal?

- commit these scenarios of bps and watches into a repository?

- edit/read them in a textual form to patch or share over an IM?

- store traces of previous sessions and diff them to find out what changed?

Does anything even remotely similar exist? Most debuggers are just test-pause-and-inspect tools with “integration” in the form of eval on mouse hover. Their ux and dx sucks and the only reason I could find to use them were slow build times and too low-level runtimes, which are no more today.

Pretty sure most people avoid debuggers not because they are too hard to learn (they aren’t), but because they are too dumb to be useful, given that you can ‘if (cond) log.level(…)’ and restart instantly.

> - assign (scenario, subsystem, level, description) to breakpoints and watches, so they can be turned on/off or selected in groups for debugging without removal?

In Jetbrain's tools they definitely can. I can

* create a bunch of breakpoints

* give them descriptions

* only have them break on execution under certain conditions (conditions stated via the programming language being debugged, so `my_struct.some_func() == 5`)

* disable and enable breakpoints with a click of a button

* have a breakpoint only become active when another breakpoint got hit (and therefore only cause the debugging logic to execute in certain code paths

* Have a breakpoint not stop execution when it gets hit, which is useful because I can then

* Log when a breakpoint gets hit, including it's stack trace (so I can see exactly the flow that got me to that breakpoint)

* Evaluate some variable when a breakpoint is hit and log that evaluation.

All of this with an extremely simple UI that can be manipulated without any recompiles and while the application is running. I've gotten tons of value of debugging complex scenarios in both C# and Rust via this constructs.

So while I'm not going to convince you that debuggers are worthwhile, to call them "too dumb to be useful" is pretty naive.

Well, this is good to learn. I skimmed through intellij debugger docs before writing that comment and didn’t find anything like that. Thanks!

A screenshot showing the UI for this is https://resources.jetbrains.com/help/img/idea/2022.2/cl_brea... (from https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/using-breakpoints.html). Though that screenshot doesn't show the description field, which definitely exists on my CLion build.

I don't know that I'm convinced of that point though. I've been developing software professionally for almost 20 years and my usage and reliance on a debugger has decreased over time. At the moment, I think it's been probably three months since I've last used one.

This. I used to use debugger all the time as a more junior dev, but I haven't used one in years now. Also, over time I spend more and more time writing tests. When there's a problem a simple print, echo, console.log or whatever is usually enough to solve it quickly.

The problem that debuggers solve is simply not a big problem anymore, in my experience. Definitely not worth the setup hassle when actively working on multiple platforms.

That’s a fine opinion to hold, until you work on applications that you cannot debug for one reason or another.

As a fellow debugger lover, having to basically use log statements instead of being able to reach in and debug was a rude awakening. Some people probably don’t know that debugging can be easy with the right combination of IDE and language. Or the billion software layers mean that the debugger fails to attach for some reason which can’t be figured out.

I have a decent experience in all sorts of debuggers (from softice to gdb to ide) and prefer log() where possible. The reasons are: less-ing a log is superior to stepping into. Step-based debugging doesn’t work in production or retrospectively. That’s it.

This kind of post is unhelpful and unnecessary.

Debugging and using IDEs are entirely orthogonal. DTrace and lldb are far more valuable to me than a graphical step debugger, which I effectively never use. As it happens I use JetBrains IDEs full time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com