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Comment by kannanvijayan | Hacker News Reader

I haven't had to in a while as I've lapsed into IDE usage as of late, but my vimrc is something I committed to memory a long time ago.

  set tabstop=4
  set shiftwidth=4
  set expandtab
  set showmatch
  set nohlsearch

  set background=dark
  syntax on

Typing that config into a file is emotionally associated with a system feeling "ready" for me. "ah, now I can _do_ things".

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No accounting for taste, but my similarly terse vim config includes relativenumber and number. Relativenumber is just so damn useful for doing things to larger chunks of code without having to count lines or anything.

I'm also an IDE user though. I tend to maintain a dichotomy between emacs(with evil-mode, of course) as the "kitchen sink" set up, with all the fixings, and vim with a config so short I can type it in as commands if I need to.

Vanilla vim is really perfect for quick edits to config files, scripts on random servers/VMs etc.

Bigger projects, at least for my usage, all happen on the same system , and having a bit more involved of an emacs set up makes sense there.

I suppose one could do a similar dichotomy with vim/neovim, if one had a distaste for emacs.

… why `memory commit` what you can `git commit` and then just `git clone`.

(I keep most of my dotfiles in a repository called "dotfiles".)

I get the emotional value/desire for a minimalistic .vimrc, but I also need the usefulness, and that necessitates, e.g., pulling in some plugins. E.g., lang-servers are just so valuable for immediate feedback in the editor.

Over time, someone of my vimrc has been pruned away just by development that has happened in/on vim itself, which is always lovely to see.

spoken like someone who has never had to operate on someone else's machine that they provisioned for you on an isolated network

Operate yeah. But write lots of code?

Yep. Some orgs require it.

I'm not arguing for it, just saying I've seen it at multiple billion-dollar+-a-quarter companies.

Oh that sucks.

I've done it. It was terrible. I'm glad the project ended.

There's no fixing it, though. I can know the "base tooling with zero config" … and I'm just less productive, that's all there is too it. Customized tooling makes me faster than the base tooling. (I did start trying to find "inventive" ways to try to work around the problem, of course. My case wasn't like military air-gapped or anything, just the only connection was via RDP. So for example, copy & paste is a communication channel.)

I mean there is a middle ground. LSP is good for coding a project. But I do agree with your point. What I generally do (as nvim user) reduces plugins to the bare minimum and try as much as possible to do progressive enhancement (atleast I try). Maybe as nvim improves LSP, I hope the diff between LSP and native methods are close enough that they both work.

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