Hacker News Reader

Comment by ernst_klim | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately many new developers don't believe in powerful "power" tools anymore.

I have to use IntelliJ due to Kotlin codebase, but I'm still more of a fun of Emacs and I don't like Idea that much. I think IDEs somewhat lack the power that simpler tools have, which is automation.

One thing I miss from IntelliJ is programmability. That's why I still use Emacs on workplace for anything outside of Kotlin (git, grepping, note-taking etc). I even edit code in Emacs from time to time when it's easier to write a Lisp function which will batch edit code than doing keyboard macro.

Another thing I'm missing from IntelliJ is determinism. Everything is asynchronous, so the same combinations of actions can lead to different results, making automatisation painful.

View on HN

You might find this interesting:

https://dmitrykandalov.com/liveplugin

IntelliJ is very programmable, but it can be a bit intimidating because out of the box it assumes that you want to program it by creating plugins. That's very different to the elisp REPL driven approach. LivePlugin bridges the gap by letting you control the IDE from a repl-like console, building up scriptlets that use the same plugin APIs. There are examples for how to do things like add menu items, explore the semantic PSI trees, trigger refactorings or do whatever else you want to do.

Also, IdeaVim is just awful compared to Evil.

- Tracks the mode globally (rather than per editor), and treats mode-switching as an edit operation (so if you accidentally enter a read-only tab in insert mode then you need to switch to another tab, escape, and then go back to get your keybinds back.

- Doesn't bind escape in sidebar dialogs, so trying to exit insert mode in a terminal or commit dialog just defocuses the sidebar instead

- Still applies its other binds, so even falling back to CUA/IntelliJ keybinds doesn't work either!

- Makes no effort to integrate IntelliJ keybinds, all you get for conflicts is "would you like to lose the Vim or IntelliJ functionality that binds this key?"

The difference is stark when you compare it to something like Evil that actually values the user experience. (How's that for an irony?)

There are things missing from Emacs too. Intelligent project and context aware auto-complete. Project wide search that works out of the box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com