Comment by tzhenghao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzhenghao | Hacker News Reader

I'm more of a vim guy, but "I get it". I started using these "serious" editors back in college and eventually settled with vim over emacs. I don't wanna get into the whole editor wars - it's like picking a Pokemon at the start of the game.

I went through the whole phase of adding a bunch of plugins, custom macros and have a huge .vimrc file that, once in a while, would break if I was using the wrong vim variant {vi, vim, nvim}. For the sake of this argument, emacs users face some form of the same too.

It got to a point where all my hardcore configurations made my editor experience diverge even further away from the promised "out of the box" experience, and not on par with autocomplete functionalities available in modern IDEs like VSCode.

So now I'm on VSCode. A M1 MacBook can handle it, so I told myself to quit being a masochist, and that itself saves me hours especially navigating a big and complex codebase. But I remember how to use vim, and that comes in handy if I have to SSH into some remote machine and make some tweaks to scripts.

I started down the same path, but ended up somewhere else.

I decided to allow myself as many extra features as I wanted with one caveat: all plugins had to be pure vimscript.

Reproducing an exact dev environment is just a git clone away, because there are no external dependencies outside of vim itself.

This is not very restrictive: you have fuzzy search with Ctrl-P, get full-featured language server support with vim-lsp etc.

This is possible because Vim8+ (released 6 years ago) has a native plugin manager which is very easy to manage via git submodules.

"I don't wanna get into the whole editor wars - it's like picking a Pokemon at the start of the game."

This encapsulates my feelings completely, haha. Both require so much investment and you spend a lot of time with them, just like the pokemon you pick at the beginning.

I'd love to use VSCode for the completion and other polished conveniences that just work. I detest having to manually configure anything.

But vim moves and keybinds are just too good.

If there was a combination that actually worked well, I'd switch in a heartbeat. But so far I haven't encountered an option with all of:

* vim bindings (no compromises)

* great completion / IDE experience

* no configuration

Currently my "pick 2 out of 3" is low config nvim, with bad completion as a result...

I don't use it much, but VSCode's vim plugin seems pretty good these days. I know everyone has a different subset of vim commands they consider essential, but everything I use regularly seems to work: change list, '/' for incremental search, f, marks, macros, split windows etc. Actually, I may have just talked myself into using VSCode over MacVim...

You can fully embed Neovim into VSCode: https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim, which seems like it might work for you?

Thanks, I'll check it out!

Have you stopped using Vim keybindings entirely? That seems far more masochistic to me.

Personally, most vim emulations in most editors are "good enough", so I generally use Intellij (Java) or VSCode (everything else) with Vim modes.

At least for Emacs, dealing with big codebases isn't a problem. Modern approach to dealing with this is to use language servers. This is also what VSCode does. So, suggesting you have better autocompletion in VSCode vs Emacs (or Vim) is just a sign of not knowing how that works, because they are, literally, doing the same thing...

> it's like picking a Pokemon at the start of the game

I haven't heard that before, but I feel like that's the best way to decribe it.

~~emacs~~ water type pokemon are the best clearly.

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