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Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

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Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#2
Having seen this article when I first started using vim seriously, I'd recommend fzf.vim in place of ctrl-p and ALE in place of Syntastic. The former I find is much more performant, and the latter takes advantage of Vim8 / neovim's asynchronous features. Plus, fzf.vim comes with Ag, which effectively replaces Ack.vim (albeit, with a little bit of tweaking).

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#3
Surprised they recommend a single colorscheme (jellybeans) at bottom of article.

Moving between machines and terminals different colorschemes seem to work better than others. This has like a million colorschemes (OK, slight exaggeration but it does have more than I've been able to review. Usually pick from 5 or 6 favorites commented out in .vimrc).

https://github.com/flazz/vim-colorschemes

Also they recommend https://github.com/Shougo/neocomplcache.vim (which I've used for years). Reviewing some vim plugins the other day I noticed that github hasn't been updated in 3 years and recommends another plugin now. (Don't plan on switching until it breaks though).

Guessing this article may be a few years old?

Yes, it says 2014 at top

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#4
post #2

Having seen this article when I first started using vim seriously, I'd recommend fzf.vim in place of ctrl-p and ALE in place of Syntastic. The former I find is much more performant, and the latter takes advantage of Vim8 / neovim's asynchronous features. Plus, fzf.vim comes with Ag, which effectively replaces Ack.vim (albeit, with a little bit of tweaking).

That is the reason I chose neomake, because syntastic was dragging vim down. I'm curious, how does ALE compare to neomake?

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#5
This should be only an experiment at best. Please don't waste so much time trying to turn a tool into something that it is explicitely not.

If you just want an IDE experience use one that already exists. If you want to build your own out of plugins, use something like Emacs that has something like that as a core feature.

If you really want to learn vim though, then please learn the IDE that it is already integrated in: Linux. Linux based OSes are the most extensive IDEs because in the past nobody thought there would be a difference between a programmer and a computer user. So it's the most complete system that you can find. And additionally to solving all your programmer problems you also learn an OS and its components on the way.

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#7
post #2

Having seen this article when I first started using vim seriously, I'd recommend fzf.vim in place of ctrl-p and ALE in place of Syntastic. The former I find is much more performant, and the latter takes advantage of Vim8 / neovim's asynchronous features. Plus, fzf.vim comes with Ag, which effectively replaces Ack.vim (albeit, with a little bit of tweaking).

You can go even further by using FZF+ripgrep, it's so much faster.

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#8
post #3

Surprised they recommend a single colorscheme (jellybeans) at bottom of article. Moving between machines and terminals different colorschemes seem to work better than others. This has like a million colorschemes (OK, slight exaggeration but it does have more than I've been able to review. Usually pick from 5 or 6 favorites commented out in .vimrc). https://github.com/flazz/vim-colorschemes Also they recommend https:/…

Might be good if the date could be mentioned in the title:-)

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#10
While I would never sell it as "turning vim into an IDE", I use most of these plugins. ctrl-P is great, but I would probably switch to fzf if I was bothering to update my vimrc and plugins lately.

Fundamentally, I think people trying to sell emacs/vim with plugins as "turn X into an IDE" are sort of not getting what people see and get from IDEs, though. There's quite a bit more integration that goes into IDEs and what you're making is a pretty barebones/poor IDE with these plugins.

Most languages, though, don't need an actual IDE for them to be great. You need the auto-completion, automatic compilation/error checking, jump to definition, easy-to-reach documentation, etc., for them to instantly be super productive while coding.

Spacemacs with Haskell plugins is one of the best coding experiences I've had and it even taught me some patterns that I didn't know about. Another highlight is OCaml tooling that works really great with both Emacs and vim.

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