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Switching from Vim to Intellij

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Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it's about 5GB. IMO yes. My machine has like 8 total and Chrome monopolizes quite a bit.

and lately for me it's been Zoom and Discord on top of Chrome and Jetbrains. Trying to write code while on a call is a recipe for memory giving up.

The computer I bought as a "poor" (western) student in 2012 had 16 GB ram. I can't really see any professionals stuck with 8 GB ram nowadays. As I said, even Chrome will kill a computer with that amount.

So I can see it being an issue, I just think an IDE isn't optimized for that kind of usage, I guess? I acknowledge I'm speaking from privilege here, though, and that probably non-professional users would like to use this software as well.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#62

I switch from Vim to IntelliJ and then back multiple times every day - one is for fast editing of smaller codebases and the other is for sprawling codebases. One thing I've noticed about IntelliJ though (and any other IDE), is that eventually I manage to get the thing configured into some inconsistent state that I can't figure out how to get out of and I have to restart everything from scratch before I can get things…

Every few weeks I get my (vscode) IDE into a state where it no longer autocompleted and I have to reinstall it. Have yet to encounter the problem with emacs

I have my intellij idea pretty exhaustively customized for years and i have never had any of these issues described here. you might need to be careful about which plugins you're using.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#63

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.

which part runs like mosasses: the indexing? typing visual latency? bootup time? etc?

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#64
post #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.

If you plan to be a professional software engineer, then I recommend just paying for the best tools. The price of one hour of an engineer's salary (give or take) can pay for the entire IntelliJ suite for a year.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#65

I don't really care how good emacs or vim are for text editing, I always crave a good IDE as text editing is just a small part of writing code. It may be because I'm using java/kotlin, and the stuff a good IDE can do there is much more than in some other languages. But the refactoring, find usages, debugging, building, etc is just so smooth and integrated I've become an IntelliJ fanboy.

Refactoring tools do more harm than good and they exist to duct tape the complexity path some programming languages set you on by adding more complexity.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#66

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.

I've tried evil mode a couple times over the years, but slight behavioral differences threw me off my game. I don't remember exactly (it was years ago on the last attempt), but it was something small like the cursor position being slightly different after some operation like shifting a line.

My "problem" is that since I've been using the same editor for 30 years, I don't tend to think too much about the manipulation of text. So even the tiniest of behavior changes is unsettling to me.

Though I could probably adapt.

I should try it all again (maybe not emacs, but something), and really set up everything well for auto-complete and such (mainly C and Rust). My current vim setup (using pathogen) is sort of a mess.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and lately for me it's been Zoom and Discord on top of Chrome and Jetbrains. Trying to write code while on a call is a recipe for memory giving up.

The computer I bought as a "poor" (western) student in 2012 had 16 GB ram. I can't really see any professionals stuck with 8 GB ram nowadays. As I said, even Chrome will kill a computer with that amount. So I can see it being an issue, I just think an IDE isn't optimized for that kind of usage, I guess? I acknowledge I'm speaking from privilege here, though, and that probably non-professional users would like to use…

Fair—I think this ties into a difference into the ubiquity of powerful systems and internet in the west. For example, up until not too long ago, I could not just blindly afford to have a 2GB visual studio toolset downloading in the background for rust without completely blocking the wifi. In general though, that size is literally peanuts.

For what it's worth, I just took a glance at required PyCharm specs.¹ They recommend 8GB and minimum 2GB ram, which seems a bit dumbed down. I can't imagine anyone being able to properly run it without at least 4 gigs of ram even if they have nothing else running.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/#section=windows

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#68

I don't really care how good emacs or vim are for text editing, I always crave a good IDE as text editing is just a small part of writing code. It may be because I'm using java/kotlin, and the stuff a good IDE can do there is much more than in some other languages. But the refactoring, find usages, debugging, building, etc is just so smooth and integrated I've become an IntelliJ fanboy.

Refactoring tools do more harm than good and they exist to duct tape the complexity path some programming languages set you on by adding more complexity.

That's... an interesting take. I'm not sure it's well founded, could you expand on your thought?

The refactoring tools in JetBrains products are amazing for me. Renaming a variable and having all uses within scopes renamed too is great. Renaming classes by patterns is also great. Being able to move definitions to new files and have it update all my imports etc is great.

Not sure I see any downsides to optional tools

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#69

I don't really care how good emacs or vim are for text editing, I always crave a good IDE as text editing is just a small part of writing code. It may be because I'm using java/kotlin, and the stuff a good IDE can do there is much more than in some other languages. But the refactoring, find usages, debugging, building, etc is just so smooth and integrated I've become an IntelliJ fanboy.

Refactoring tools do more harm than good and they exist to duct tape the complexity path some programming languages set you on by adding more complexity.

I'm not aware of any languages so simple that renaming an identifier and its usages isn't a useful feature.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#70

you were unhappy with the plugins. learn vim the right way and ditch plugins altogether.

Agreed, as Vim/Neovim has risen in popularity recently it seems there is a trend of people thinking it’s only usable if you install these 57 plugins, and a large number of these users seem to have blind spots on Vim’s native capability. The autocomplete feature is a great example of this. I do not use an autocomplete plugin at all, but rather use Vim’s native ins-completion. Combined with a language server and a ligh…

I've checked out a build of neovim, and the native LSP is rudimentary but even in that form, very slick.

I am often torn with the same conundrum - I've been using neovim for Ocaml, and I really just like vim as an editor, but having inline linting is really really nice. But it's also really, really complex to configure, and it detracts from why I love vim so much - if I wanted an IDE, I'd be doing my Scala work over in Intellij.

I'm still contemplating whether I can get what I want with a second window a file watcher running build commands.

Agreed the treesitter is also really exciting.

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