Switching from Vim to Intellij • Hacker News Board

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#101

Post by mmm_grayons » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

cpow85 wrote: post #56

ezekiel68 wrote: post #34

I was thinking there might be something interesting here. Then I got to this line: "I started a new job working on a large typescript React project. Vim couldn’t handle opening a TSX file larger than 50 lines without crashing." And I was like LOL WUT? The author's case in this regard woudl be stronger if they helped us understand what was actually going wrong. Bad plugins? Conflicting macros? I'm pretty sure that sim…

Right, The point was about configuration. I had a configuration that worked for a couple years, then I start a new job and the config breaks on the first 50+ line TSX file. Now I have to go and find the culprit, find a replacement plugin (in this case, yajs JS parser was slowing things down). and before I knew it, I was re-configuring everything again. I was more criticizing the ecosystem of plugins and how brittle s…

That's definitely a huge issue. I've had the same experience of having to spend hours to a day getting my configuration set up for a new language. I think part of the problem is that there's no basic config for a language (as with other editors) from which users can tweak, mostly because anyone who tried to get vim users to standardize on any defaults other than those shipping with vim itself would be strung up and horse-whipped as a purveyor of bloat. Vim is a great editor and I love using it, but many community members have a "leet" attitude that discourages new users who need help.

It would be a whole lot easier if someone put together a set of basic configs for various languages that had language servers, completion, etc. and everyone referred new people to those. It's much easier to tweak and replace stuff than to assemble an entire config wholesale.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#102

Post by mrozbarry » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #90

mrozbarry wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some mixed feelings on whether or not it's a point in favor or not. Just like any system, don't install plugins/copy+paste config that you don't understand or can't maintain. I've been able to open tsx files with linting/highlighting/testing plugins and everything works as expected. On the flip side, if you want easy configuration, then yes, vim/emacs/similar are not necessarily the right choices for you, but I…

> Just like any system, don't install plugins/copy+paste config that you don't understand or can't maintain. I don't think this advice makes sense at all. I can't maintain cc-mode and I don't understand how it works, yet I rely on it. Users should not be expected to understand how the TypeScript autocompletion works in order to get it working. I can open VS Code on a TypeScript project and get autocompletion working…

Oh, I don't mean like you could maintain the library, just the configuration it may expect you to provide it.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#103

Post by jmarcher » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

a_imho wrote: post #74

matsemann wrote: post #36

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.

So much so, that I suspect a lot of programming languages not see wider adaptation because of crude tooling. What good does it make to have advanced language features when the development experience is subpar? I would suspect if a language advertises it has superior reasoning capabilities about code that should also enable a superior IDE experience as well. Where are those IDEs?

No kidding, I tend to wait for Jetbrains to support things officially before seriously trying new languages. I just need my refactoring tools.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#104

Post by aidenn0 » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #31

aidenn0 wrote: 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

Do you have "+y and "+p configured to use the system clipboard? Does that work for you even when running vim over ssh?

As an aside, I just tested it and "+y and "+p work fine with vim over ssh if you enable X11 forwarding. Apparently you may need to use "gvim -v" rather than "vim" on Ubuntu though.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#105

Post by cpow85 » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

marketingPro wrote: post #79

pvg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a warning, it's a random insinuation. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like.

If I can prove an employee of the company is posting it but acting like a genuine person, can I do that?

I mean, I am not an employee of JetBrains, so... I don't know where you're going with this

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#106

Post by scruple » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

adimitrov wrote: post #99

scruple wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing statements like this and I want to believe. I really, really do. I see the value in Emacs Lisp vs. vimscript immediately, though I feel that Lua in neovim is making up ground there. I've tried evil-mode a few times over the years. Most recently I tried Doom Emacs twice. I _really_ want to experience the hype of org-mode. I want something like org-mode in my life. I am a heavy notes taker and I can see…

I started using Vim in mid/late 2000s, and successfully switched to Emacs. Without knowing your specific gripes, it's hard no know what'll end up helping you, but here are my two cents: - use emacsclient and have aliases for emacsclient -c and and emacsclient -n for popping up a new frame or using the console, respectively. I even have a window manager binding to open a new Emacs client window - Rainer König is the b…

Thank you for this list, I appreciate the effort. I've got some time off of work next week and the kids won't be home, so I'll spend the day digging into this.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#107

Post by drinchev » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

As a longtime WebStorm user I would really appreciate a WebStorm + let’s say PyCharm vs IntelliJ. I’m a bit happy by the default configuration of each dedicated IDE, rather than clicking around in IntelliJ and fix stuff. What’s your opinion on that?

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#108

Post by t0mbstone » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 8:03 PM UTC

clashmeifyoucan wrote: post #52

matsemann wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for ram usage, I currently have two huge java projects open, and three elm/frontend projects with all the shared packages opened as modules, and it's about 5GB. While it's certainly more than a text editor (still less than chrome lol), is it really so bad? My laptop got 64GB of ram and 34GB of those are sitting unused and 8GB is just cache. I actually prefer it to use more ram than having to recompute stuff or loa…

well, there is your answer. You can afford to have it open, I'm running on 8GB ram so the jetbrains ram usage has a considerable cost.

If you are a developer and you can't afford a machine that has more than 8 gigs of RAM, what are you even doing?

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#109

Post by layoric » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #32

jlelse wrote: 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.

You could always just use the early access builds, which are free, and usually don't have any major bugs whatsoever.

While an OK option if you're optimizing only for money spent on tools, I would still say this is not a good idea. There are bugs and depending on your workflow can be pretty dramatic show stoppers. Value your time more, upgrade when you need new features/solving a problem but otherwise I think stability in your tooling is very valuable.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#110

Post by dcolkitt » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #68

Scarbutt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean, Java is pretty notorious for sprawling names like INetworkSessionManagerFactorySidecarControllerFactoryHelper. It's pretty hard to argue that that phenomenon isn't driven by the ubiquity of IDEs in the Java community.

With high-powered auto-completion and one-button refactoring, your brain stops processing the full name. No one's incentive to pause for a minute and come up with thoughtful variable names. For most developers it's too mentally tempting to just puke out some CamelCase word salad, because the IDE hides all the effort of having to read/write/remember unfortunate names.