Comment by silasdavis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silasdavis | Hacker News Reader

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I can identify with much of this.

After an unfortunate bout of Java development, I was flung into the arms of Intellij, steadily won over by the indexing and the reliability of the refactoring tools. The Vim plugin was good enough and defining some chords for editor shortcuts resulted in a kind of fucked up fat vim emacs mode that was quite productive.

I, too, got fed up of spending inordinate amounts of debugging vimscript and incompatibilities to end up with something that was slower or buggier than an IDE in certain crucial ways or with highly debugging resistant niggles.

But I'm also far from in love with Intellij these days. It's slow. Prone to index corruption with lots annoyances I can't easily fix myself. I may churn to vscode. But I'm definitely in the gravity well of Intellij.

However perhaps this is worth a look. I have historically had a fairly high tolerance to plowing hours I'm never getting back into fiddling with tools. Just less than I used to. More nixos gnome, alacritty than gentoo, xmonad, urxvt...

Don’t even bother using anything but IntelliJ for JVM work. I use Neovim for everything, but not Java/Kotlin.

Same. IntelliJ is just too damn good for JVM work, and specially for Kotlin. jdtls ans other Java langservers are decent, but unfortunately, kotlin_language_server is miles behind IntelliJ.

Not only that, but in my experience everyone else will be using IntelliJ, so the project is usually dependent on IntelliJ in some form. Sometimes subtlely, sometimes not so subtlely. It will usually build with gradle since it has to for CI/CD, but beyond that everytime I worked on a new project I had to fix all kinds of subtle problems that were the result of some config/state that IntelliJ keeps outside the repo and nobody notices because they all use IntelliJ.

I spent quite a long time trying to get nvim-jdtls configured correctly and playing well with all the other LSPs I have configured. Had it mostly working and I did like writing a large amount of Java for a greenfield project in Neovim, but then a bunch of it broke again when I upgraded either nvim or one of its plugins. So I spent some time trying to make the IdeaVim plugin work as closely as I can get it to my Neovim setup and am finding that to be a happy medium. But I might still come back to Neovim for raw editing at some point if the LSP issues do get sorted out.

I somewhat like Intellij too, but it seems insanely slow, esp. with the Vim plugin. I have to slow down my editing sometimes, because all it's fancy features can't handle the speed.

When it's having a particular bad day I can sometimes rename a file-local unexported symbol faster than it can (pointlessly) search the entire repository for the name. Or when it's on an indexing holiday I can navigate by memory to a file I want with mouse-and-tree faster than it can. This make me sad and feels more common than it used to.

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