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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it more appropriate to compare this to aider?

I prefer the command line tools to IDE integration, even though I don't feel like the contextual options are great. In other words, I don't always feel that I can see the changes fully. I like Claude Code's option to expand the result using ctrl-r, and I like the diffs it provides. But, it still feels like there is a way to get better than what I see inside Zed and what I see inside Claude and Aider.

Maybe an editor that can be controlled and modified on the fly using natural language?

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I've settled on aider and vim.

The best experience I've had is to completely divorce editing from vibe coding. Ask the chatbot to do something, then review the results as if a junior developer submitted them - that means diffs and opening files in the editor.

Fundamentally I think these are really distinct operations. I understand why the kitchen sink IDEs jam the genAI tools into their UIs, but I don't think it's necessarily important to link the two functions.

I share the same experience. Looking at diffs inside a terminal is as helpful as looking at diffs inside GitHub. I need code navigation to fully understand the impact of a code change or just the code base.

I exclusively use Claude Code these days, and I don't remember having accepted the result of a prompt a single time on the first shot. I always have to fix some stuff here and there, improve some tests or comments or even make the code more readable. Being in an IDE is a must for me, and I don't see how this could change.

specifically for working better with diffs, I can recommend tmux + lazygit with this keybinding for quickly opening a floating lazygit:

bind-key C-g display-popup -E -d "#{pane_current_path}" -xC -yC -w 80% -h 75% "lazygit"

not only does it allow you to see the diffs, but you can directly discard changes you don't want, stage, commit, etc.

Damn, thanks, i have some floating panes on tmux but never thought about doing something like this lol

tmux! That was today's project. I'm using Claude Code Opus 4 to translate a K&R C computer algebra system (Macaulay) from the 1980's into C23. Finally getting to the "compiles but crashes" (64 bit issues) I found us living inside the lldb debugger. While I vastly prefer a true terminal to the periscope AI agent view in Cursor, it was still painful having at best a partial view of Claude's shell use, interleaved with our chat. What I wanted was a separate terminal session AI and I could share as equal partners.

tmux is the quickest way to implement such an idea.

Damn, this is brilliant. Thank you.

Side note, if you're a lazygit fan, consider using gitui as an alternative. Feature wise they're pretty similar but gitui is much faster and I find it easier to use.

https://github.com/gitui-org/gitui

That's an interesting idea! I struggle with the same issues you've mentioned, that space between the IDE integrated option and pure CLI. Your comment sparked an idea of using something like vim or similar where you can edit the config on the fly and reload it. I wonder how hard it would be to bolt a prompt interface to the front to have it build the editor for you?

It would likely quickly devolve into typical editor config bikeshedding, only AI powered? At least for me, maybe someone smarter could streamline it enough to be useful though!

I was hoping I would goad someone into doing it.

But, do it for emacs, ok? </joke>

Actually, I *do* prefer emacs.

aider has an emacs integration

I'm running Claude Code with vscode. With frequent commits I can use the source control tab to get a feeling of changes being made. This helps in spotting changes to files that should not have been changed.

I've been using VSCode with aider, but with auto-committing turned off. VSCode has a thing where changes not yet checked into the tree are highlighted in the scrollbars -- blue for modified, green for added, red for removed. You can then click the colored part of the sidebar to see a diff.

Just for fun I typically also have an emacs window open; "git diff > working.diff" lets you see the diff, then "C-c C-c" on a diff hunk will take you the place in the file where that change was made.

I use claude code + pycharm (when need to check changes, improve something)

Being able to open the diff in vimdiff view (or your editor's equivalent) would be a neat approach. Not entirely sure how to actually implement that.

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