Comment by doorhammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doorhammer | Hacker News Reader

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I used VIM as my only editor for something like four years, but I've got a full time .net/C# job now.

I can still use vim shortcuts comfortably and such, but setting up the environment was always a pain for me.

I was setting up an editing environment on a linux VM at home to write some Haskell, and started looking through vim plugins, etc. I got sick of it after five minutes because I didn't really want it to be a big thing, so I installed ST2 and the various haskell plugins. It took about ten minutes to get it running in a state where I could compile/build/repl from the text editor and have basic vim motions (which is really all I need from it right now). It also has a few things I really dig like the fuzzy command palette and multiple cursors (which are now available in a lot of editors, but ST2 still has the cleanest implementation that I've used so far).

I think the package manager/extensible side of vim is what really bugs me. Sure I can get in and figure it out, but I just don't want to most of the time.

Obviously this is a really superficial look at what vim has to offer and a very narrow use-case/problem; ymmv dramatically. I contributed a pretty solid chunk of change to the neovim project and I'm really a big fan of vim in general, but for that specific use case, I wasn't terribly happy.

> setting up the environment was always a pain for me.

I have never understood this argument. Copying my local .vimrc and .vim from one machine to another has always been enough to create an _exact duplicate_ of my environment. What's missing?

Agreed. I'm honestly not sure how it could be made easier.

It's mostly to do with the various plugins that I use. I can pretty quickly get to syntax highlighting and editing with vim (read: instantly), but the other tools that I like integrating into my editing are where I hit a wall every time. Even with that I could sync everything via git or dropbox or whatever else that I wanted to do. It's just the fact that I have to dig through my mental notes to get it working. I also don't specifically have a VIM haskell environment to clone. (I don't have a sublime haskell environment to clone, either)

I'm not that it's necessarily excessively complicated; it's just not particularly straight forward, either. This could just be a failing on my part, but I haven't set up a vim environment in about a year, and there were enough confusing parts to do a little head scratching to get haskell plugins working to make me grab something else for now. With ST2, it's been about the same amount of time since I've set it up and only took around ten minutes to finish (that's with plugins to integrate HLint, compilation, a repl, type checking, etc).

Again, keep in mind that I said this was a very narrow use-case/situation. I'm not arguing that VIM is more difficult to set up for any case outside of the exact one I said. I'm not saying it is or isn't a generalizable point. I'd really have to do more digging to find out. What I am saying is that in this situation ST2 was easier to setup.

I'm also not arguing against VIM because of setup time/difficulties. Setting up a coding environment should be a relatively small chunk of the total time you spend using it to code. I'm just noting a relevant experience I had last night.

What tools are you trying to use that make it such a hassle?

Keep in mind that I said it's not excessively complicated or an extreme hassle. It was just less straight forward for me than using ST2 to get an immediate dev environment going with the haskell tools/integration I wanted (hlint, repl, error/type checking/hints, etc).

Yeah, it sounds like vim just isn't your thing.

Super late reply, but I don't think that's true.

I haven't written anything here that says I won't use vim, or that I don't plan on using vim. I used it for years before, and even given those issues, I'm sure I'll end up using it again. I love the feel of the modal editing and how far people go with plugins/extensions.

That said, everything I noted can be fixed and made to go away. It's all accidental complexity. Package management, plugin management, and installation are all problems that don't necessarily have much essential complexity. If the Neovim project keeps traction, it looks like it'll go a long way toward making all of those substantially easier, or at least toward making it substantially easier to create solutions to those problems.

Either way I'll continue to use vim, but I'll also probably use ST2 a bit as well. The next time I set up an environment, I'll just be much more careful to set it up in a way that makes it much easier to migrate to another computer.

Fair enough! To each their own.

vundle: https://github.com/gmarik/Vundle.vim

you keep a list of plugins in your .vimrc, beats dropboxing hands down.

There are certain features where this would be problematic. Things such as copy/paste to/from the OS clipboard, and a few extensions that require ruby support (since ruby isn't always available).

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm thinking of.

They're things that aren't horrifyingly difficult to setup or remember, but they make it a little more complicated and don't feel straight forward.

They're not things that would keep me from using vim, but for this particular context, they're things that made me decide to just throw ST2 on the vm

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