Hacker News Reader

In the last Stack Overflow survey[1] I was surprised to see quite a large percentage of respondents considered vim to be an "IDE". Don't get me wrong, I love vim and nvim, but I use them as editors and not as a fully fledged IDEs.

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-integrated...

View on HN

Vim is a code editor for me and my entire OS is my IDE.

The thing though is that I can pipe stuff other applications are doing into my vim terminal and have it effectively behave like an IDE.

There’s very little (nothing?) an IDE does that cannot also be exposed and manipulated within VIM (and the same goes for Emacs obviously).

If you install enough vim plugins you can get pretty close to VS Code in terms of both features and performance.

I wouldn't call VS code an IDE either, personally

Well, UNIX is the IDE ("The UNIX Programming Environment") and vi/vim is just the editor component of that. This is only half serious but I'm not fully joking either. The combination of tools and the ability to make pipes and custom scripts does, over a while result in a decent "development environment".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com