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Comment by mike_h | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone moved from a vim workflow to a tool like this and stuck with it?

I've found IDEs useful in the past when getting onboard an existing project that's new to me, but I pretty quickly jump back to my text shredder and terminal windows. Wondering if people see sustained productivity gains with modern IDE tech. I know JetBrains has been a well-regarded IDE producer for years now.

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I have moved from Vim to JetBrains' IDE for Python - PyCharm. In response @netmute in this thread I know my way through vim, have edited in it for 10 years, have a bunch of plugins installed and know all the necessary wizard spells, and still do a lot of other things in it. Yet, in case of Python I have never looked back.

Python support in default vim is abysmal. You can probably beat vim to do useful things with Python by installing a gajillion of plugins, but my time that I would spend on it is not worth 200$ that I paid for PyCharm's corporate license. Even then I am not sure Python support in vim would be anything close to what I have in PyCharm out of box.

For me, the killer features in PyCharm were completion and on-the-fly code-checking. There are definitely some vim packages for the former, but all I tried were slow and/or buggy. And I have never found the replacement for the latter. Other things like built-in graphical debugger with variable auto-watcher and coverage visualization are the icing on a cake (and a very thick one).

Thanks for sharing your experience. I didn't know that Python support was that bad in vim. Can't say the same for Ruby thought.

I tend to go back and forth between vim and RubyMine. I like editing in vim, but when I want/need to use a debugger, I use RubyMine. RubyMine has a vim keymap (I believe they also have emacs), so editing within it is not so bad either.

I think I've adopted this since I went from an IDE -> vim instead of the opposite. Having a visual debugger was one of the features that kept me in an IDE (at least for Ruby). I just never felt like I was as productive without it.

I highly doubt that anyone confident in vim would even consider going back to an IDE.

Anyway, IF there is anyone I would really like to hear the story.

There's a fairly decent vim plugin for all of the JetBrains IDEs called IdeaVIM. Here's a post from the same blog about it:

http://blog.jetbrains.com/ruby/2009/08/rubymine-for-vim-addi...

And here's the direct link to the plugin:

http://plugins.jetbrains.net/plugin/?ruby&id=164

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