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Comment by hakaaaaak | Hacker News Reader

I want to see developers who are experts in IDea, emacs, vim, etc. face off to code a variety of projects in several languages/frameworks side by side in each editor/IDE so we talk about the empirical differences. vim is a lot faster for many things, but I wonder how well it compares when you need to debug Java remotely (in a container on another server), for example.

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If all you will do is write Java, and things like integrating remote debugging into your text editor are critical, and you don't care about vim's way of working, then you can find better options for that, definitely. IDEA is a great, well-polished specialist tool. You don't need a shootout to see this clearly.

Of course, you know that vim does not have remote Java debugging out of the box and that the Java community has long focused on IDEs, so this is not exactly a random benchmark you mention :)

vim is better for a more modular approach which is valuable when you will often need to change platforms, languages, tweak for a new workflow, etc. Know a good remote debugger? Sure, just use that...

Whether you're adding IDE features to vim or vim features to an IDE, you'll always going to have to live with compromises.

The vim editor is awesome, but all this 'bolt on a bunch of stuff to make vim more like an IDE' is misguided imo. If you use Java, use eclim for a vim-like experience in Eclipse; if you use Visual Studio, use viemu.

(that said, I still wrote a vim plugin to display the php manual function declaration in the status bar when you have your cursor nead the name of a vim function... but just because there is no 'real' IDE for php though)

I haven't used it but is PhpStorm no 'real' IDE for PHP? There's a vim plugin for various JetBrains products too (including PhpStorm) and it works well with IDEA.

> if you use Visual Studio, use viemu.

I recommend vsvim. It is open source and free where viemu costs $99.

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3-...

I worked with Zend Studio around it's 5th release and it was quite ok. Don't know about now, though.

"I want to see developers who are experts in IDea, emacs, vim, etc. face off..."

What makes you think they're mutually exclusive? For years I've ran Emacs and IntelliJ IDEA both configured to "synch files on change (on disk)" so that I could be synched between Emacs and IDEA. Both were (and still are) always open simultaneously.

Now in Eclipse you can use eclim which either turns Eclipse in server-mode or which allos to use vim as the text editor right in the middle of Eclipse.

There's also emacs-eclim: it's not as advanced but it has the merit to show that there's hope and light at the end of the tunnel.

Thing is: anyone efficient enough with vim/Emacs shall never find the "text editor" part of any idea to come anywhere close to vim/Emacs.

I need to remotely debug code? One shortcut and I'm under IntelliJ IDEA.

I need to efficiently edit files containting text, like source code files, one shortcut and I'm under Emacs...

I hope one day people writing IDEs will realize that no-one has ever written an IDE with a "text editor" that could match vim/Emacs and hence decide, from the start, to make the text editor pluggable.

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