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Switching from Vim to Intellij

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Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#221
post #211
post #204

I knew it was another stack that made the switch. I use emacs for Clojure and I've been using VSCode for Typescript projects. Both had the largest communites of relevant developers making the best tools. And VSCode has the best TS plugins and the latest cool stuff. Plus with VSCode I can use VIM mode, which does enough of the job (you know than 90%, minus the 10% which will never be the same). But I still use Vim for…

> And VSCode has the best TS plugins and the latest cool stuff. I don't know why or how, but JetBrains IDEs (WebStorm, IntelliJ, etc.) have much better TypeScript support than VS Code. I've used them both on the same project, and it's painful to use VS Code. The main advantage of the JetBrains IDEs is that their built-in hinting/linting and code sense are much better. VS Code will fail to warn me about things that Je…

My coworker uses a Jetbrains version for Rails and swears by it. I gave it a shot but couldn't get into it 100%. I wouldn't say it's bad. In my experience of mostly frontend work, I give vim #1, Code #2, and JetBrains x edition #3.

Something about Code just works well for me for Typescript/Vue frontend work. But TBH I haven't tried TS in JetBrains. All I know is all the main TS devs seem to use Code and all the latest and greatest plugins get there first. It takes quite some time for them to filter down to Vim's community.

Maybe I'll give it another shot one day as TS matures.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#222
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…

I know vim isn't for people who want everything set up out of the box. But I think installation of the extensions for LSP / completion / navigation etc.. features could've been easier. In my limited experience, it's a hassle getting these tools to work.

This will get a lot simpler in the next couple of months when Neovim 0.5 ships with built in LSP support.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#224
Surprised to not find mentioned one of (neo)vim's main selling points for me - works in a terminal! GUIs, desktop apps are a complete non starter for me.

Give me a well designed commercial, terminal-based editor ( with a vim backend of course ), and I will happily pay for it.

Until then, it's nvim with mostly working plugins and I'm happy.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#225
post #165

Most important problem missed with fancy IDE: Tiny monitor. Its like looking at your source code thru a paper towel tube instead of in VR. Even if you can get a bigger monitor and give up on laptops, you'd STILL get to see more code at once using VIM. Its "nice" and "interesting" I can see my build system innards on the left and with effort I can click them in and out but in practice people are lazy and just don't ge…

At the same time some people are using plugins like limelight and goyo too see less in their vim setups.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#226
I don’t know about intellij but I did use Webstorm for a few years, nice UI, but eventually it just slowed down to a crawl and was unusable. The support team kept saying to wait for the next release, which never fixed the issue. Very bad experience. Changed IDEs and all the slow down issues disappeared instantly. I won’t try them again.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#227
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…

> But on the other hand, please consider the Zen of dumb tools: I code all day in Vim and I don't use YouCompleteMe, NERDTree or anything like that. I use dumb, language-agnostic completion and dumb, language-agnostic FZF and Rg for searching and navigating the source code. If I'm feeling fancy I use universal-ctags, but if it's not here FZF and Rg do a good enough job.

I understand this preference, but it's also important to recognize that you are essentially programming with one hand tied behind your back when you are choosing to use such tools instead of an IDE when one is available.

For example, free IntelliJ can do "Data flow from/to here" analysis on your code for Java (probably others as well), which analyzes your whole project and finds all the code paths that use/provide a value for a variable, at any depth of calls. For a medium-sized product, finding the same information with Rg is easily 30m of work; if you need to navigate between the levels to find a bug, you'll lose even more time.

Also, refactoring tools that an IDE can give you make certain programming tasks trivial at 3-5 key presses which would easily be a 2 day change in a medium project using basic text processing tools.

Especially now that most IDEs also support VIM or emacs key bindings, it is very rarely a good idea for medium-to-large codebases to rely on text processing tools instead of a full IDE. Note that I'm also considering vim/emacs+language server or similar extensions as an IDE (though LSP has quite a way to go, especially on the refactoring side).

For small projects, or for languages with poor code analysis support, I do agree that these advantages don't amount to much and personal preference and familiarity amounts to much more than any tools an IDE can give.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#228
post #214
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…

How do you hook vim up to email and HN comments?

Email is easy if you are using mutt. HN comments... I'd like to know that, too. Before Firefox switched to WebExtensions, there was a plugin that opened gvim when you pressed some hotkey while the focus was on an textarea. Now there is textern, but it requires some additional binary.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#229
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…

> But on the other hand, please consider the Zen of dumb tools: I code all day in Vim and I don't use YouCompleteMe, NERDTree or anything like that. I use dumb, language-agnostic completion and dumb, language-agnostic FZF and Rg for searching and navigating the source code. If I'm feeling fancy I use universal-ctags, but if it's not here FZF and Rg do a good enough job. I understand this preference, but it's also imp…

I land in the "if you need an IDE, you already took a wrong turn" school of thought, basically Paul Graham's position in this old post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72710

granted, we don't always get to choose what language we use or what code bases we inherit.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But on the other hand, please consider the Zen of dumb tools: I code all day in Vim and I don't use YouCompleteMe, NERDTree or anything like that. I use dumb, language-agnostic completion and dumb, language-agnostic FZF and Rg for searching and navigating the source code. If I'm feeling fancy I use universal-ctags, but if it's not here FZF and Rg do a good enough job. I understand this preference, but it's also imp…

I land in the "if you need an IDE, you already took a wrong turn" school of thought, basically Paul Graham's position in this old post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72710 granted, we don't always get to choose what language we use or what code bases we inherit.

That's a very strange attitude from someone who proselytizes Lisp, the language which pioneered IDEs about 30 years before other languages really had anything comparable.

Emacs, for Common Lisp, is still a much more advanced IDE than many languages have. It used to actually be a significant ingredient in the secret sauce that made Lisp so powerful - an advantage which it has thoroughly lost to IntelliJ/Visual Studio in my opinion.

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