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Switching from Vim to Intellij

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Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#21
I recently switched from IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate to VS Code for Go development (side project), because I don't want to pay for it, when I'm no longer a student. With Golang VS Code works great after getting used to it. The Go plugin is not available for the community edition. For Java and Android development I always used (and still use) IDEA because it's feels much better than Eclipse.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#24

Agree with the article. I love Vim, but mostly use webstorm for the same reasons. I just find all jetbrains products run like molasses, even with a 12-core machine with 32GB ram. I work fairly quick, and get frustrated when my editor holds me up. Surprised to hear about the crashing issues with typescript, but I don't have any experience there.

JetBrains products seem hit or miss for me.

AppCode is way snappier for me than Kotlin-in-IDEA. AppCode is also more likely to shit the bed and not be able to find a standard library class with ctrl-click.

PHPStorm has never given me trouble.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#25

"Switching" seems like a strong reaction, but there's something to the feeling the author describes. I use vim quite a lot, every day. I also use IntelliJ IDEA every day. And yes, there's a bit of mental switching I do, and every now and then I use vim navigation keys while in IDEA, but generally it works for me. Different tools for different jobs. Then again, I have no trouble loading reasonably large documents in v…

I'm the same way. The wires don't really seem to ever get crossed for me. When I'm using intelliJ, I honestly find that I'm not really typing all that much. I'm either reading/navigating code (and therefore ctrl-clicking on identifiers or using shortcuts for finding usages etc), or typing in a pretty linear fashion that is the sort of thing I'd be in insert mode for the entire block anyway. So when I spend most of my time navigating/reading, it feels really good to have a robust first-class experience with the relevant features in your chosen environment. I know vim can do all that stuff, but it's all tacked on and never (IME) doesn't feel tasked on. Whereas the IDE understands the semantics (the AST) in a way that vim/ctags likely never will.

Some of this is particularly strong due to the language I use most - Java - where the IDE is nearly bulletproof in terms of finding exactly, only, and all real usages of identifiers (it won't ever get confused by two different identifiers with the same name) which isn't true for pycharm/python (though it does a good job honestly, but you can't blindly trust it like you can with intelliJ). I could see how someone would find pycharm not quite as much of a win over ctags, though IMO it still is.

[edit] That said, I still use vim quite a lot. I wouldn't use anything else for editing config files or just examining text content. Especially since you can pipe to it - seldom a day goes by when I don't "| vim -" instead of less or anything else.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#28
As a long-term Emacs user, I started really enjoying typing with Vim bindings (evil mode).

It feels to me that Vim is great at the low-level process of editing text. Everything else is fine - as good as any power editor, but not inherently great. This is the complement of Emacs, which to me is exactly the other way around.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#30
post #10

What does the author mean by "setting up copy/paste? I've been using vim for about 20 years and just do "+y and "+p

I've found it to be a colossal pain in the ass in WSL, since the emulated linux clipboard isn't synced with the windows clipboard. I have to :wq, cat the file, and ctrl-ins to copy.
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