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Comment by freerobby | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure you've seen it, but just to be sure - there's an IntelliJ plugin that gives you vim key bindings: http://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/?id=164

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It's a good effort, but suffers from the usual problems of replicating Vim, ie lots of subtle changes and lots of missing functionality. Both of which wreak havoc with one's muscle memory.

Also, I found it really slowed things down (in RubyMine), sometimes updating just 1-2 characters a second in a big project (on a modern MBP).

I've gone back and forth, but generally I prefer Vim with Janus distro, albeit I miss a lot of cool things from IDEA.

Define Modern.

I just upgraded from a "modern" macbook pro (2008, aftermarket SSD) to a "modern" retina macbook pro that is maxed out. IntelliJ and RubyMine fly like the wind on this new machine. The old one was painful to use IntelliJ but you could live with RubyMine performance.

Highest-spec 2011 with SSD. RubyMine was okay, but RubyMine+IntelliVim on a large file would often be painfully slow.

The major pain point with that plugin for me is the fact that you can't remap jj to escape in insert mode. Multi character codes will wait until a chord is found type of approach instead of a timeout one.

have seen it, but when I'm in intellij, I'm in intellij. when in vim, i'm in vim - my brain shifts enough where I don't really need the vim bindings.

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