Comment by konart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by konart | Hacker News Reader

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>The amount of work needed to get a basic IDE up and running for your languages of choice, even for commonly used languages such as Python or Javascript, is far too much for someone who wants to get on with their day job or hobby coding and doesn't want to spend precious hours fixing obscure issues in Lu

Can't agree with this at all.

I don't think I've spent more than an hour in total setting up my vim config back in a day and maybe 1-2 hours in total when migrating to neovim (lua, packer etc) and then migrating to Lazy.

Yes, you have to spend some time building your own DE, but at least now you know what it can really do, all the hows and whys.

>Furthermore, the community does not have a good culture of documentation and learning

Most of the plugins have docs that can be accessed via (neo)vim itself. Usually you can find all information there.

>Setting up that plugin will require another plugin, and so on until you end up with a Jenga tower of dependencies...

Not true at all. Only a few plugins have strong dependecies and even then you rarely come across a plugin that will have more than one dep.

Haha 1-2 hours ... Maybe things have improved since 2018 but I was up to about 25 hours and still not satisfied with the results. That might be just being a perfectionist or coming from another IDE and trying to replicate something. But 1-2 hours is not a reasonable amount of time to set aside to set up a truly usable custom ide with neovim to acquire the knowledge to drive it.

>and still not satisfied with the results

One can never be satisfied with the results. "There is no endgame", right?

1-2 hours is more than enough to get to work with autocompletion, syntax, filesystem explorer and a few more plugins for your convenience.

>coming from another IDE and trying to replicate something

This. Some people try to replicate IDEA or something like that. Obviously you can spend weeks trying to do this

Hell, configuring https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap + https://github.com/rcarriga/nvim-dap-ui can take a week alone I guess.

I’ve plugging away at NeoVim in my spare time trying to get it working and it took me a weeks before I just gave up and directly ripped someone else’s LazyVim config to finally get things working in a state I’m happy with.

Never mind that in order to get modern syntax highlighting and code completion you need LSP-Server, Mason, and Null-ls. The first which has per language dependencies and the 3rd is about to be archived.

Also I don’t know what world you live in but a tool a verbose and powerful as NeoVim you can spend hours just reading the documentation and getting a handle on the basics let alone configuring things to your liking

null-ls is now archived so you don't need it (dark humor). Anyway - you needed it for linting\formatting etc.

Modern syntax highlighting comes with treesitter, you don't need anything but theme that supports it.

You also don't really need Mason unless you want an automated way of managing your providers. And LSP-config+Co is needed anyway - neovim\VSCode and other editors use it all the same.

>Also I don’t know what world you live in ...

We were talking about building a config, not about learning every dark corner of it. You don't have to go much further than Packer's or LazyVim readme.md to get a grasp of what's going on. Things were much harder when it was vim and vimscript + some plugins.

> Most of the plugins have docs that can be accessed via (neo)vim itself. Usually you can find all information there.

This was something which took some time for me to notice. There are some plugins which have the best documentations I have ever seen, but you need to read it from the Vim.

Example of coc.nvim: https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim/blob/master/doc/coc.txt and https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim/blob/master/doc/coc-con... and https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim/blob/master/doc/coc-api...

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