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Comment by et1337 | Hacker News Reader

In my book, it’s way better to install one Vim extension in whatever your favorite IDE is, than to install Vim with a hodge podge of 5 extensions and 300 lines of Vimscript. The keybindings are really the unique selling point of Vim, and you can get them anywhere.

I actually view this as another advantage of Vim; you don’t have to learn new keybindings every time you switch editors.

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Don't forget the browser.

Vimium radically improved my entire web browsing experience. I can't live without it anymore.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

Qutebrowser is worth a mention too. Google has sufficiently neutered extensions that I fell out of the flow pretty often with Vimium (e.g., can't work on any of the built-in pages or some other Google properties), but having chrome exist at a much lower level and building the UI around vim bindings has made it a 10x better experience for me in Qutebrowser.

There is `--extensions-chrome-urls` command-line flag (Chrome shows a scary warning, it works otherwise).

I used Vimium for years until I discovered SurfingKey, which offers way more features.

Great it also highlights searches, hated that Vimium didn't do that :-)

And with the Firenvim extension you can run a neovim instance in any text area! (Currently typing this inside neovim inside my browser)

The set of permissions needed is somewhat concerning

checkout tridactyl, it gives much better experience than vimium.

Love Vimium! Loved it so much I wanted it OS-wide. So I made Homerow, basically Vimium + Spotlight for the macOS user interface.

https://homerow.app

> The keybindings are really the unique selling point of Vim, and you can get them anywhere.

This is going to vary heavily from user to user. I'll admit it's been some years since I last tried anything new, but I never found Vim keybindings that were complete and configurable enough to comfortably replace Vim. It's always more like a UI uncanny valley in that the keybindings are relatively close, but imperfect enough that they interfere with my typical workflow.

Definitely agree. I've been trying to go full-Vim a few times over the years, and it's not been very successful. I'm a huge fan of Vim keybindings though, and wouldn't use an editor/IDE without support for it.

I would say that going 100% Vim is reasonable if you have a very stable development stack/environment. You spend a few weeks (or months, which is more realistic IMO) setting things the way you like and then use the setup for years.

If you work in several different languages, connect to several different databases, and also like to play with other tech stuff, VS code (and/or JetBrains products) with Vim bindings is usually more ergonomic. Both VS code and JB have very nice Vim plugins, so you get like 80% of Vim power + a lot of polish and modern tooling from VS code/JB.

there's also neovim extensions for vscode which uses neovim as the "server" so to speak that does vim things and then updates your vscode. in practice it works very well... especially the more recent updates to it. just have to have a neovim binary installed somewhere and point the extension to it.

I've started full-vim and eventually settled for exactly that. It's been a success. Recently had to work from Windows after years on Mac, also using VSCode after years of Intellij and it wasn't a big deal because the Vim experience was mostly on par between Intellij and VSCode. I still prefer Intellij, but the remote coding (over SSH) experience on VSCode is just so much better.

Eh, I've never run into a vim emulator that didn't do something I used or the surrounding environment made it a hassle to integrate deeper. Vim is the entire runtime that also integrates with the Unix command line

Even better, use Neovim’s server mode in your IDE, since then you're getting “real ” vim, not just a plugin that attempts to copy it.

> The keybindings are really the unique selling point of Vim, and you can get them anywhere.

How you know somebody doesn't have a clue what they are talking about.

That's like saying "chess is a bunch of nerds playing chess with more pieces."

Evil, VsCodeVim, IdeaVim are all faithful reproductions with thorough coverage of the typical text editing use cases.

Which of them understand what gn and cgn are supposed to do?

Evil and ideavim both do, haven't tested vscodevim

But it's the limitations of the "typical text editing use cases" that will bite you in the end.

You get the illusion that you are using Vim and at some point you are rudely reminded that no, you are using something like it, but missing crucial features.

I tried to use VsCodeVim, but I stopped after it made me lose a file...

Personally I like Vim because I do a lot of coding while in an SSH session and it's easy to port my setup very quickly. My work involves using a workstation with a GPU so I am not able to do that at home, and debugging requires me to run things from command line a lot to know what to change in the code. No doubt I could create a set up with a fancier IDE to do that, but at the scale I'm working in (academic code with just 1000s of lines of code) there is really no need.

You could also use VS Code's remote (over SSH) ability.

You can do the same with vscode btw. I also work on remote gpu workstations and vscode remote with ssh works just fine, especially if you use tmux, you can preserve all the history and what you were doing.

In my experience, vscode remote code editing is very buggy and resource hungry. Not very fitting if your Internet is unstable/slow and/or your target workstation is not that powerful (why is 8GB of RAM not enough?). I've had more success with Neovim either with distant.nvim[0] or directly on the Workstation with mosh[1]

0: https://distant.rocks/

1: https://mosh.org/

I would say that’s making the assumption that IDE is actually bound to the key bindings in a useful way (e.g. file exploring)

I have yet to find an IDE that has integrated well with key bindings.

> The keybindings are really the unique selling point of Vim, and you can get them anywhere.

I beg to differ. The whole Vim is the selling point of Vim and that includes a fully functional Ex mode (command line).

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