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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

#11

Post by memco »

bechap wrote: 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).

The article also recommends neocomplcache, whose github says its deprecated and to use neocomplete, which is also deprecated and suggests you use deoplete. At least the chain ends there for now.

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#12

Post by geowwy »

59nadir wrote: post #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 wha…

> 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.

I think even that's putting it generously. It's not turning vim into an IDE at all, just adding some modern text editor features like you'd find in Atom or Sublime.

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#13

Post by geowwy »

Rainymood wrote: post #9
rimher wrote: post #6

There'll always be a part of me that wants to learn vim better and set something like this up. Then there's the other part of me, that just uses Sublime instead.

The learning curve is steep but learning Vim is worth it.

Subjectively I think it's worth it because vim feels more comfortable to me but I'd be surprised if Textmate/Sublime/Atom are any less productive. They're all pretty good editors.

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#15

Post by c256 »

59nadir wrote: post #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 wha…

I don’t disagree on principle, but a highly-configured Emacs can easily reach levels of integration that I think is worthy of the “Integrated Development Environment” label. For vim, I suspect it’s more like “as close to IDE level as a dedicated vim user is likely to want”. (Fwiw, I use Emacs a lot, vim a little, and my hardcore IDE usage is several years back, so maybe that’s just my biases showing.)

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#16

Post by rjzzleep »

59nadir wrote: post #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 wha…

And what exactly is it that you're getting from an IDE?

You get refactoring, jump to def, auto completion, linting, code snippets, documentation, depending on the languages you use. For Java there are more lightweight alternatives which lack refactoring features that IntelliJ has, but there has been eclim for ages. But that's using eclipse in the background you say? Well, at some point you're bound to use a language native component to use reflection.

What about Omnisharp? How was Monosharp an IDE and vim with Omnisharp integration, which was based on the same components wasn't?

I feel like the discussion has degraded to peoples perceptions of what an IDE should be. And for most people that perception is: "It should look like IntelliJ" or "It should look like Visual Studio".

Maybe what you really mean is:

It should have refactoring.

It should have auto completion.

It should do performance instrumentation.

It should allow debugger integration.

And then there's the question of how far each feature has to be integrated. For most IDEs performance instrumentation is really just a seperate tool that you can launch form the IDEs toolbar.

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#17

Post by 127 »

I tried very hard to get used to Vim. I just feel compared to something like Visual Studio Code it's still very clunky.

I can understand why people who have used it for a decade prefer Vim over other text editors. They already know how to use it and how to integrate it into their workflow. For a newcomer this task, it seems, is nigh insurmountable.

Are there people who recently got into it and think it's the superior way to code and why?

For me, it was a lot of wasted time trying to learn Vim and finding out that other editors that I already use are as good or better.

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#18

Post by dozzie »

127 wrote: post #17

I tried very hard to get used to Vim. I just feel compared to something like Visual Studio Code it's still very clunky. I can understand why people who have used it for a decade prefer Vim over other text editors. They already know how to use it and how to integrate it into their workflow. For a newcomer this task, it seems, is nigh insurmountable. Are there people who recently got into it and think it's the superior…

> I just feel compared to something like Visual Studio Code it's still very clunky.

From my perspective, if you're trying to turn Vim into an IDE, you're using it in the wrong way. Vim is an excellent text editor and leave it at that. Whatever you still need (build system, file management, version management, package management, debugging, log collection, and so on), build your environment with external tools that have nothing to do with Vim.

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#19

Post by dan00 »

127 wrote: post #17

I tried very hard to get used to Vim. I just feel compared to something like Visual Studio Code it's still very clunky. I can understand why people who have used it for a decade prefer Vim over other text editors. They already know how to use it and how to integrate it into their workflow. For a newcomer this task, it seems, is nigh insurmountable. Are there people who recently got into it and think it's the superior…

There's no question, that editors like vim or emacs have a very steep learning curve and it might not payoff for everyone.

I'm using vim now for ~15 years and it all started during university on a unix machine with a limited number of options, so I was somehow forced to learn either vi or emacs. I don't know if I would have ever learned vim if I had the options of today.

But I also like powerful tools, so perhaps I still would have, and what I like most about these more powerful editors is the ability to optimize them to my prefered workflow.

Sometimes you've to fiddle a bit around, which can be very annoying, but at the end I almost always get to a solution I like to work with.

Re: Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

#20

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

127 wrote: post #17

I tried very hard to get used to Vim. I just feel compared to something like Visual Studio Code it's still very clunky. I can understand why people who have used it for a decade prefer Vim over other text editors. They already know how to use it and how to integrate it into their workflow. For a newcomer this task, it seems, is nigh insurmountable. Are there people who recently got into it and think it's the superior…

> I tried very hard to get used to Vim. I just feel compared to something like Visual Studio Code it's still very clunky.

This just means you failed to get used to Vim. Has nothing to do with it being "clunky".

I use Vim for many cases, and other IDEs for when I'm forced to use them, such as Android studio (IntelliJ) for Android, XCode for iOS, and certain languages where it's hard to remember the syntax, so I think I'm qualified to answer, coming from a user of all of these editors.

For dealing with API-heavy frameworks I think IDE is good. But even then I prefer to have some sort of Vim plugin integrated into the editor so I can take advantage of shortcuts from both the IDE itself and the Vim scheme.

One benefit with Vim is that it's become almost a standard that you can find vim plugin in any IDE (Except for recent changes in XCode) so you can just expect to jump on to any editor and be immediately productive, without having to learn each editor command. You don't have that for Sublime or Atom. Sure some editors have similar commands for dealing with similar features, but not always.

It's an "editing scheme", not just a single editor.

This is why it's much more efficient in the grand scheme of things than any other editors exactly because of that, in my opinion.

Editors will come and go, but editing schemes are forever.

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