Abandoning VIM | Hacker News Reader

Abandoning VIM

guzalexander.com

8 pointskalimatas26 comments

This article was disappointing. It basically boils down to "I didn't like it", which the author is entitled to, but it doesn't give much to grab on to.

Honestly, I felt like the end of the article was a bit of a cliffhanger.

You know, I could never get into using vim. All the hotkeys and commands seem really counter-intuitive. Maybe because it wasn't my first, but i find Nano and Jed far more useable day to day for quick editing than VIM. And I love how there is so much work trying to get VIM to be a IDE. I have found that Intellij is an IDE that can pretty much handle any language, Has bindings for almost anything and works well. If not, I just use a different IDE.

In all honesty< I havent found a language I that I use that I can't work on in VIsual Studio or Intellij.

I just could never use VIM or Emacs. Seemed like I was trying too hard to make it do something that it wasn't intended to do.

Then again, i do see the other side of VIM that could be awesome if I could ever learn to use it, and its powerful scripting and plugins. Maybe if we could take Nano and add the power of VIM without the horribly counter-intuitive usage of VIM.

> Seemed like I was trying too hard to make it do something that it wasn't intended to do.

This is a very common mistake, really. Vim is different. Not embracing this difference will only result in frustration.

What I meant by that actually, was everyone says to use it as an IDE, but it felt like I was trying too hard to make it work like an IDE, than accept ti for what it really is, just a text editor with some useful scripts.

Not everyone. A few blowhards with blogs. You were just following what seemed like an universal truth. There's nothing really wrong with that.

Most of Vim users simply take it as it is and don't waste other people's time misleading them.

You may say you're abandoning it, but you really can't. As smoyer said, it's just too beneficial when you ssh into a box and may not have access to the fancy editor that you have customized on your own setup. It and emacs are a well oiled tool in many people's toolboxes, and because of that, it makes it even more valuable.

Of course I still use it to edit source code on production servers sometimes. Learning VIM for a long time was quite good experience that helps me a lot.

In my opinion, this article left out the most important part: what editor or IDE Guz is switching to, or if he hasn't decided yet, what his options are.

Of you are interested I switched to PhpStorm. I like it very much. And it has a plugin that allow you to edit source code with VIM bindings :)

I use both VIM and an IDE for the very reasons described in the article. You just can't ignore the productivity gains of a modern IDE when refactoring, etc. But VIM is great for remote work and when you're creating new files and code.

It's also possible to change the key bindings in Eclipse to emulate Vi.

How much of your time do you realistically spend remote coding via an ssh connection, though?

I know enough of Vi to get by in that situation, but I wouldn't force myself into using it on my day to day just for the sake of "using the same tool" or something.

Not much at all anymore ... our processes try to be a lot more refined ;)

Vim is a text editor (and a very good one), it isn't an IDE and it is a bad idea to try making it an IDE.

A better idea would be to use it INTO an IDE. I know some IDE let the user choose vim for editing text but I only use vim in a linux shell so I don't know if those integrations works very well.

Unless you are going to stick to a small subset of major corporate-sponsored languages and choose a different IDE for each of them, I don't see how you will get by with less tool-sharpening than vim. Vim is exceptionally useful across a wide swath of editing tasks with minimal configuration.

What features "missing" from vim caused you to switch? With nerd-tree and fuzzy filename searching, ctrl-p or Command-T (I'm on MacVim,) ack, VimClojure for the repl, minibufexplorer and the rest of the Janus bundle for autocomplete / syntax highlighting I have everything I need.

Linux and Vim are an IDE. The best I've ever come across.

This was a pretty useless article. Do we need to hear it every time some changes editor. You don't talk about reasons. What about alternatives?

If you choose Netbeans like I did, you will soon find yourself using jVi. Muscle memory is strong, you must admit that ;)

Author mistakes a text editor for an IDE and drops it when he understands his error. How interesting!

I knew that VIM was an editor, but I hoped I could turn into powerfull IDE as many articles suggested. I was wrong unfortunately.

You were wrong, obviously, but the people who made you believe that with their stupid blog posts are wrong, too. I'd say they are more wrong than you.

Those blog post are seriously misleading: at best, one can come up with a vim config that make it look like a stereotypical IDE: file tree on the left, class tree on the right, quickfix at the bottom, completion… But there's a lot more to an IDE than that. Because Vim will never understand your code as an IDE does it will never be an IDE, full stop.

It can be the (super charged) editor module of your development environment but it would take a lot more than a blog post with cool screenshots to explain how and why. Even this 7 parts series is probably not enough: http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/

I'm gonna write an article about the fact that I'm changing my blue car for a red one, just because.

A quote: "I can almost here you guys laughing ..."

No, you can't. Not yet. s/here/hear/

Thanks :)) English isn't my native language and sometimes (may be more than I want to) I make mistypes.

If you want use IDE, try some vim plugin for IDE, like vrapper, ideavim and so on

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