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Switching from Vim to Intellij

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Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#231

Post by dehrmann »

jqcoffey wrote: post #119

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…

> 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 the core language libraries, this had the interesting side effect of only using well documented libraries.

I guess that's nice to know, but it's also almost trivia. I write better code faster in an IDE and navigate existing code faster, and this is having worked in vi, VS Code, and IntelliJ.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#232

Post by pvorb »

Roboprog wrote: post #159
pvorb wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody who is too lazy to choose a good variable name in IntelliJ would also have chosen a bad (or even worse) variable name without the tooling. I don't buy that argument. For class names it might be true that long compound names are driven by auto suggestions from the IDE. But I'm wondering if they're really as bad as their reputation. Somehow it's similar as for variables. You can still come up with more meaning…

I think the parent post was attributing longFuglyCapsUnpronouncabeName type identifiers to the Java language/culture, As much as (just) the editor? I’m biased, though. I HATE gigantic supposedly “self documenting” (but utterly impossible to actually say aloud) identifiers. My ideal identifiers are 2, maybe 3, syllables, with dashes or underscores, with actual documentation of WHY anything visible beyond The scope of…

I guess any piece of code will have someone who finds it horrifying. I prefer long, self documenting identifiers over short (often misleading) ones any time.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#233

Post by gerash »

jolmg wrote: post #136
drtz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How often do people rename identifiers for that to be a particularly useful feature? If it's not that often, you might be served fine with something like sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' **.rb It's not precise, so it might take some manual work and tweaking with the patterns, but for how often I've had to rename identifiers, it works good enough to handle the bulk work. A bit of forethought when first naming things works wonders…

Refactoring is an essential part of software development. sed is not gonna cut it. The same way that inserting a newline character every 80 or so characters cannot be called source code formatting

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#234

Post by nemoniac »

tsimionescu wrote: post #230
theonemind wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a school of thought that Slime in Emacs is such a different beast from what is generally considered to be an IDE that it doesn't belong in that category. My guess is that pg belongs to that school.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#235

Post by haxney »

jolmg wrote: post #136
drtz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How often do people rename identifiers for that to be a particularly useful feature? If it's not that often, you might be served fine with something like sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' **.rb It's not precise, so it might take some manual work and tweaking with the patterns, but for how often I've had to rename identifiers, it works good enough to handle the bulk work. A bit of forethought when first naming things works wonders…

That only works if the identifier name is unique across your files. What if you have a field on class "Zoo" named "containers" and you want to replace it with "animal_containers", but only for the "Zoo" class? There are probably other usages of "containers" in the code, with no easy way for something like sed to distinguish between "zoo_instance.containers" and "car_instance.containers".

You need an editor that can understand "this usage of 'containers' refers only to class 'Zoo', so I should find all variables of type 'Zoo' which reference the 'containers' field and change those."

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#236

Post by pjmlp »

nemoniac wrote: post #234
tsimionescu wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a school of thought that Slime in Emacs is such a different beast from what is generally considered to be an IDE that it doesn't belong in that category. My guess is that pg belongs to that school.

I guess that is because Emacs is just a fraction of what Common Lisp environments are capable of, so what gets happy with what they can get (as free beer).

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#237

Post by pjmlp »

pugworthy wrote: post #170
kissgyorgy wrote: post #164

Switching from a bicycle to a truck. Vim is NOT an IDE. Yes a lot of people try to make it one, but Vim is not very good at it. You need a lot of additional small tools to even come close to a full-blown IDE in functionality. It's a text editor.

I share that perspective, but then I guess it comes from using VI (then VIM) for a long time. When IDEs came along, I appreciated what they added in terms of references and build integrations, but as far as being editors of text, they didn't do much for me. Managers of complex text, yes.

Came along into UNIX world, I was dismayed when comparing my Xenix VI experience with Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS, let alone the Windows 3.x versions.

Or even against programmers editors like SlickEdit.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#238

Post by pjmlp »

p5a0u9l wrote: post #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.

I guess it is time to revive Turbo Vision.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#239

Post by simias »

mr_mitm wrote: post #228
dbtc wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There still are plugins, you just need a helper tool on your system to run the actual commands.

Tridactyl provides the feature but if you just want external edit without the intrusive vim binding layer you can try Textern, it worked well back when I tried it.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#240

Post by pjmlp »

keithnz wrote: post #192
lkramer wrote: post #188

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#

Minus several relevant tools from Visual Studio.

I guess it is fine if one only cares about ASP.NET Core, and enjoys a little Java to power their .NET development stack.

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