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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

I used that settings for a few years, then tried to move entirely to vim, and now I'm very happy with vscode + vim.

I like vim as a touch typer, I think it's a setting that minimize end motions. It's also very convenient in the terminal. On the other hand, I think it's not convenient as an IDE: too many shortcuts, clumsy integration with LSPs, especially when you need to work with different languages.

For me it works best as a light, universal, editing mode on top of a modern solution for an IDE. That being said, I wonder if I wouldn't be better off moving away from vim entirely and get used to a simple setting which works straight out of the box.

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> That being said, I wonder if I wouldn't be better off moving away from vim entirely

That's a surprising sentence to read, as someone who's also used to vim (although I've moved from vim to emacs+evil and not the other way around).

I have some gripes with my emacs+evil setup, just as I had some gripes with my vim (and then neovim) setup. But none of those gripes were related to the actual text editing, but rather making those tools behave like an IDE.

For the modal text editing, after I got used to it, I have zero complaints, and I feel much more comfortable editing any sort of text/code that way.

If I had to choose, I'd rather give up syntax highlighting than modal editing, because it has become so ingrained.

> That's a surprising sentence to read, as someone who's also used to vim

Well, I feel modal editing is "comfortable", as in easy on the fingers. But overall, I'm also quite fluent with the mac os shortcuts. Maybe it's just a matter of learning the few things I don't know how to do without vim and I'd be equally happy. The added bonus would be to have a simplified set up that would work in every contexts where vim isn't available. That being said, it's not something I want to do actively as I'm happy with my set up, but just wondering if the benefit is real.

Even on windows, while there are some obvious editing benefits with Vim mode, there's so much you can do with modern shortcuts. VS Code is customizable as hell, and the mouse is still an invaluable tool. With a TKL keyboard, I have no issues reaching for it and then resting my hands back on my keyboard without looking down or searching for it.

Spacemacs is also a good option. I use VSCode + vim for remote development which is super nice now, I think VSCode has by far the best remote development experience, I even use it as my main terminal.

For local development I use Webstorm, Rubymine, intellij etc. with IdeaVim, this is mainly because I prefer not fiddling around with plugins and configs I want my IDE to “just work” no matter what language I am using.

For writing project plans, design docs, etc. I used to use spacemacs for org mode with vim integration but now I have found myself switching to Obsidian (which has vim keybindings) and I have been dabbling in Quarto with VSCode but I haven’t settled on a good workflow.

Spacemacs is also nice because you can use magit if you want. But I don’t recommend using eMacs or vim as your main IDE because, like you said, the auto complete tools like intellisense and GitHub copilot integrations in other IDEs just work a lot better.

I generally now just feel like I want my development environment (laptop, ide, shell) to “just work” I want to spend as little time as possible configuring that stuff and I just want to focus on actually building stuff.

Is Spacemacs still in active development?

Yes. Their main branch is the only one being developed, if you are wondering looking at their releases.

Intellij/Webstorm doesn't "just work", at least for javascript: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-57184/wrong-warning...

It's a real turn off that a commercial IDE can't get fundamental stuff like the one show in the bug tracker correct (or fixed in a timely manner). You start to question why you are even paying for the thing.

That's just a warning, though. Annoying, but it's not like you can't work because of it.

There are some annoyances like the caches and the indexing time when reinstalling node modules but I'm an FEE and I use it everyday productively for FE. The fundamentals are all sound, my favorite feature is the debugger, git integration and test runner.

I can't work out what is actually wrong here - there appears to be very little detail, would you mind explaining?

False warning about unused definition 'salary' when it is actually being used.

Thank you for explaining - I didn't think to click on the thumbnail as I thought the snippet _is_ the expanded thumbnail.

The way I see/read it: it _isn't_ being used in respect to nothing _reads_ it, except within the calculation to raise - there's nothing that reads the result of the raise. It's warning you that you are (potentially) needlessly capturing state. I agree it's a valid warning (for that specific example.)

I appreciate it is just an example to demonstrate the issue but I am unable to deduce a scenario where that wouldn't be a valid warning.

'salary' is part of the constructor's body and the constructor is being used, it shouldn't warn. Look how it just warns about 'salary' but not about 'name', in the image, only 'salary' is gray out. It's not even consistent.

For all the space/doom emacs users check out VSpaceCode it's basically all the space emacs shortcuts in vscode and i can't live without it anymore.

https://vspacecode.github.io/

what made you move off emacs?

The performance and the time investment, even with doom, there were lots of bugs and performance issues especially regarding lsp/debugging. I'm sure the problems can be resolved but i would need to sink my time into it.

NeoVim has got native LSP support, and works pretty well for me out-of-the-box for most languages. LSP servers need to be installed externally, but I hope they manage to bundle them somehow in the future. LunarVim already provides automatic LSP server installation.

Neovim also has a server mode that lets it be used to drive other editors, so you can get the best of both worlds.

Yes, neovim + vscode is quite good, better than a "vim emulation mode". I believe one of the maintainers (justinmk) uses this as his primary workflow, or at least "at work" workflow?

Not all plugin work, mostly the esoteric ones that spawn many buffers etc, but all your motions etc work fine.

Personally I find vscodes text rendering not as nice as alacritty for what ever reason, otherwise I would probably use it as my primary interface.

I've been using Mason for LSP installation, works pretty well.

There's also a Mason[0] plugin that handles the installation of LSP (also DAP/linters/formatters) installation in a very visual way.

[0] https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim

Thanks! Will try to hack it up into my setup this weekend.

I've always preferred having LSPs installed in my user bin folder (or system wide). I like to hop nto other editors and some of them, like Helix, do not have auto installer for LSPs and tries to use the locally installed package.

In other words, I like to have 1 LSP installed in my system for all of them.

I am the same and Neovim has a plugin, Mason, that auto installs them all into a bin folder. I just include that bin folder in my path and all other apps can use the same LSP servers.

one kill ring to rule them all

I doubt Neovim would bundle them.

I asked for two things which are conceptually much simpler:

1. a project manager/file explorer solution (file browser plugins have always been super popular for Vim; plus Sublime, VS Code, etc, all offer file explorers, they're extremely useful for... exploring projects for folks.

2. moving the command bar at the top

And they were both closed as WONTFIX mentioning that the Neovim core is meant to be compact and everything else should be built on top.

So that would require someone making and maintaining a super popular Neovim "distribution". I'm not saying it won't happen, but both in the Vim world and the Emacs one it doesn't seem like any distribution "won out" and you're always worried your distribution will just go away at some point.

https://www.lazyvim.org/ is really good. I use it for rust, golang, typescript (with react etc.), markdown, haskell, f#, c# and probably some others. Most all ready to go - the only exception was needing to uncomment two lines in the config for typescript lsp, all others set themselves up and away I go.

The command/status bar pops up in a modal akin to ctrl+p in vscode.

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