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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I have used VI in and out since introduced to it on Xenix in 1993.

Definitely not missing out.

I know I'm not going to convince everyone, and I know that there are other advanced options that compete (people tell me I'm missing out because I don't use an IDE with all the auto complete stuff).

But I see a lot of people using a text editor that's basically notepad, possibly with syntax highlighting. For an occasional edit that's fine, but if you regularly spend more than an hour editing a file, you would benefit from more features.

Vim has a lot if features I don't know, so I think I'm also missing out (until I learn those features). It takes investment of time to learn an advanced tool.

I'm curious, what text editor do you use?

IDEs of course, and if stuck on UNIX without an IDE, either Emacs (muscle memory goes back to XEmacs glory days) or VSCode.

Pure text editor, Notepad++.

What do you think an IDE has that a proficient vim user is lacking?

Neovim is a different beast than vi or vim, definitely suggest looking into it. It's insanely capable, and if major IDE's invested time into supporting it, you wouldn't need to ever choose between Neovim or an IDE, you could just use both together. I think currently VS Code is the only editor that supports Neovim properly, there might be others though.

The neat benefit is you get all the editors own plugins + all of Neovims plugins.

Neovide is much better editor that natively supports neovim than vscode. All vim plugins in vscode have conflicts with other extension rendering them useless

If stuck with classical UNIX editors, I rather spend my time on Emacs.

I know VI well enough to save me when nothing else is available, specially helpful when dealing with servers without root account access, and noexec $HOME, and that is good enough for me.

If Emacs ever does the headless UI thing I will crawl back to it, in all honesty. I like the idea of consistent editor key bindings across editors and consistently being able to reuse a powerful editor with any IDE.

What does it mean for an IDE to support neovim?

it probably means to run actual instance of neovim and use it as a backend for current editor's content.

Except you get features of both editors, so IntelliJ would still have their auto complete intellisense features, and Neovim key bindings would still work, and Neovim plugins as well.

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