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Switching from Vim to Intellij

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Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#191

Once coding no longer was on the critical path of my employment (as a middle manager in a large tech company) I went back to vim from IntelliJ with nothing more than syntax highlight and autoindent. The reason? I wanted to know my programming languages better. Instead of auto-imports and auto-complete I was forced to have java/scala docs open for whatever library I was using. Beyond giving me better muscle memory for…

IntelliJ lets me read library code way easier. I now pay out of pocket to get IntelliJ just for that privilege.

This used to be the case for me. With the growth of LSP and DAP, it's no longer an issue, and I'm back in Emacs for the vast majority of my daily work (including Java).

I hope LSP beats JetBrains products. It's an open standard and lets language designers focus on their language instead of tooling.

Don't get me wrong, JetBrains products are well polished and productive. I just don't see them being able to compete in the long-term with LSP, which is free and more attractive to language designers.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#192

I use Vim at work, a few light plugins for Go and I'm off. I'm not bothered with auto complete or any of that stuff, and it works great for me. In my spare time I dabble in Unity, and what I always get stuck on is the IDE for the C# code. It used to come with an IDE that was pretty good, which I forget the name of. Autocomplete and other things worked out of the box. These days it comes with Visual Studio and I find…

for unity work you can use Rider, which is basically intellij for C#

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the thing about Vim and Emacs is that the users are expected to figure out configuration problems like these. That's not a point in favor of Vim and Emacs.

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…

I guess it really depends on where you want to spend your time. Time spent customising and tweaking my tooling is time not spent focusing on my core work.

Hence why, despite my interest in Fish, I'm still just making do with Bash, I just can't justify the time to make a proper switch.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#194
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure IDEA is primarily aimed at the JVM market, but I use IDEA's refactorings in Python, Go, Bash etc.

And I'm unsure about your point about meaningful names - IDEA typically won't suggest a name when renaming an existing language artifact - type, class, object, method, function etc.

It will when extracting an expression into a variable, based on the context it was derived from, and that's actually a pretty good heuristic - e.g., if the expression being extracted is

     = dependency.get_campaign_results()
It'll suggest things like

    campaign_results
    campaigns
    results
Most of which are what a developer would usually use in that situation.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#195

Once coding no longer was on the critical path of my employment (as a middle manager in a large tech company) I went back to vim from IntelliJ with nothing more than syntax highlight and autoindent. The reason? I wanted to know my programming languages better. Instead of auto-imports and auto-complete I was forced to have java/scala docs open for whatever library I was using. Beyond giving me better muscle memory for…

That sounds awfully close to "books will ruin the world. If people stop memorizing their scriptures they'll stop believing" and complaints against progress.

"I write by hand. Using a typewriter will take me away further away from the essence of 'writing'" etc...

"Why would I email? Fax works fine for me and I get a hard copy" etc...

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#196

Intellij is definitely an amazing tool, but if you are comparing it to Vim, then I don't believe it is a correct nor fair comparison. Vim is not an IDE, and adding an infinite amount of plugins with the purpose of making it IDE-like, then complaining about how slow it is and how much it crashes, and how much better a proper IDE is, is IMHO a misconception of the true power of such a tool like Vim.

in what was is it not fair? People use Vim to produce software and they use IntelliJ to produce software. IDEs try to do a lot more out of the box than an editor, and editors try to be really extensible

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#197

Once coding no longer was on the critical path of my employment (as a middle manager in a large tech company) I went back to vim from IntelliJ with nothing more than syntax highlight and autoindent. The reason? I wanted to know my programming languages better. Instead of auto-imports and auto-complete I was forced to have java/scala docs open for whatever library I was using. Beyond giving me better muscle memory for…

That sounds awfully close to "books will ruin the world. If people stop memorizing their scriptures they'll stop believing" and complaints against progress. "I write by hand. Using a typewriter will take me away further away from the essence of 'writing'" etc... "Why would I email? Fax works fine for me and I get a hard copy" etc...

To me it sounds more like if you use orthodics, the muscles in your feet will weaken over time.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#198
post #173

>Everything is pre-configured: You don’t have to worry about setting up tags, or YouCompleteMe, or NERDTree. I can’t tell you how many times I open a new project, perhaps in a different language, and everything works great out of the box. It’s a total sigh of relief. I agree 100% here, if you value these types of IDE tools I don't recommend going to Vim. It frankly sucks at this stuff, it wasn't meant for it and it's…

+1 on vim with fzf and rg being enough for almost any task. I use that setup for most things and then when I need something with a little more syntactic awareness, I pop open my IDE.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#199

Fair warning, please also check out JetBrains' IdeaVim plugin for modal editing. I got somewhat serious RSI from vanilla IntelliJ from using the mouse and all the ctrl/cmd modifier commands. Although I currently use emacs with boon modal editing, I'm sure JetBrains would take good care of you with their vim simulation layer. An ergo keyboard helps, too.

I install Ideavim as one of the first plugins after I install IntelliJ. It works a treat and combines the best of modal text editing with the power of a full IDE like IntelliJ. Can't recommend it enough.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#200
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 should try the redhat java plugin for vscode. You won't even know that you're using eclipse :)
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