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Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

It’s not an either or.

In fact, any IDE (or any coding environment) lacking VIM bindings is broken.

As long as my computer is beefy enough, I’m perfectly happy using Jetbrains or VS Code or whatever IDE, but I always use VIM bindings and it’s been a key piece of my recovery from severe RSI. It’s been a nice productivity boost, too.

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>In fact, any IDE (or any coding environment) lacking VIM bindings is broken.

Not a fact. You just prefer vim bindings, which is fine. Other people prefer other schemes, which is also fine.

VIM bindings are a very, very common preference and were one of the first suggestions I got when dealing with repetitive stress injuries from extensive computer use and were key for my recovery. It was also key several others I know who have been through similar, albeit less extreme injuries.

I'm all for IDEs supporting many different bindings, but lacking VIM bindings is an accessibility issue and shuts out a significant % of the possible users.

You exhibit the “Vim mode paradox.” If you’re comfortable using the limited “Vim mode” in other editors, you don’t know Vim well enough to justify using it.

You've forgotten that nobody has to justify using the tools they like :)

But also, some Vi emulation modes are much, much more complete than others.

No vim mode is perfect, but they do make other editors bearable. I think vs code’s is the closest one I tried. Though I never really used it as my daily driver.

To me vim mode is just enough to keep me from ragequitting something like Xcode when using vim is practically not an option, but “vim” mode would never be enough to make me use another editor by choice. Vim isn’t just hjkl.

I tried Vim mode in XCode. When I move by paragraph, XCode crashes when it gets to the bottom of the screen.

I understand that XCode Vim mode is lacking a lot of the functionality of Vim, coming nowhere close to even the free XVim plugin. But you think they could at least make sure the few features they do include aren't completely broken.

Lolwut? I use Vim plugin for Visual Studio every day and although pretty limited compared to full fledged Vim, it's still extremely powerful. Besides hjkl movement, I still get splits, registers, macros, search/replace, formatting and the aforementioned features are easily 95% of Vim features I used to use Vim for. So the limited experience is still pretty great and I don't know how to use VS without this plugin anymore.

I used vim as my primary code editor for over 15 years. Now I use IntelliJ vim mode and am happy with it.

You're saying I don't know vim well enough. What important vim features (which I'd use if I knew vim) is IntelliJ missing?

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