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Vim Creep (2011)

rudism.com

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Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#3
I studied piano full-time for a short while. My favorite thing about it was how working on my technique or a particularly tricky rhythmic pattern tickled my brain. I often found that I went through a few phases: “ahrg, this is impossible!”, “getting there but sloppy” and finally, often suddenly (after a good night’s sleep) “this is easy! I don’t know how I was ever not able to do this”.

Using vim and learning new features tickles my brain in kinda the same way. I don’t care much for the hacker credits. It’s a fun variety in my work day to practice some little feature that I read about, and it doesn’t look like I’ll run out of new stuff to check out anytime soon.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#4
I'm interested in using vim, but I'm not thrilled about trying to set up debuggers when an IDE has it for you.

Maybe I'm over complicating it, anyone have a python based suggestion?

As a note, I do not have local admin but Vim is installed already.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#5

I'm interested in using vim, but I'm not thrilled about trying to set up debuggers when an IDE has it for you. Maybe I'm over complicating it, anyone have a python based suggestion? As a note, I do not have local admin but Vim is installed already.

tmux + ipdb would be my alternative. I even use that approach within vscode.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#6
> You recorded macros, you moved entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger, you filled dozens of registers, and you rewrote and refactored entire components without even glancing at your mouse.

You mean: spend untold hours scripting and recording interactions that give you about 10% of capabilities of a modern IDE.

I've personally seen long-time vim users switch to Idea after looking over my shoulder.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#7

I'm interested in using vim, but I'm not thrilled about trying to set up debuggers when an IDE has it for you. Maybe I'm over complicating it, anyone have a python based suggestion? As a note, I do not have local admin but Vim is installed already.

If you want to have it the other way around (having Vim inside your IDE instead of turning your Vim to an IDE) I’d suggest you to try IdeaVim [0] with PyCharm. Works very well, you can even use your own .vimrc file.

[0] - https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#8

I'm interested in using vim, but I'm not thrilled about trying to set up debuggers when an IDE has it for you. Maybe I'm over complicating it, anyone have a python based suggestion? As a note, I do not have local admin but Vim is installed already.

IMO if you want an IDE use an IDE. There are a wealth of plugins that attempt more or less successfully to bring IDE-like features to VIM, but I'm not sure I see the point personally, it'll never be as seamless as an IDE built and maintained from the ground up to do these things. I hear that many IDEs have semi-competent Vim-style editing support, so maybe that would be more to your taste.

If you want to try the Vim experience I suggest doing it the Vim way, use a minimal config when starting, only add plugins after careful consideration, prefer simple generic tools like grep/rg, FZF, dumb completion and ctags over complicated tight integration with language servers and debuggers.

But maybe you prefer more integrated environments and that's perfectly fine, but in this case I wouldn't recommend a switch to Vim unless you have a very good reason to want it.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#9

I'm interested in using vim, but I'm not thrilled about trying to set up debuggers when an IDE has it for you. Maybe I'm over complicating it, anyone have a python based suggestion? As a note, I do not have local admin but Vim is installed already.

If you're looking for an IDE I recommend Visual Studio. (Classic, not Code. Yes, on Windows.) It's awesome.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#10

I'm interested in using vim, but I'm not thrilled about trying to set up debuggers when an IDE has it for you. Maybe I'm over complicating it, anyone have a python based suggestion? As a note, I do not have local admin but Vim is installed already.

I often use a debugger (PDB++ or PuDB in Python) in my terminal, which I have open alongside Vim. But Vim historically has lacked strong IDE-like features, especially compared with Emacs.

This is starting to change with Neovim v0.5, currently only available on Git master building from source. But it's worth building from source, because it's a completely different text editor. Especially when you use a nice GUI frontend for it like Neovim-QT.

With the plugins nvim-lspconfig, nvim-treesitter, and nvim-dap, and plugin manager packer.nvim, you significantly close the gap between Neovim and Pycharm. I used to use Neovim for light duty programming and Pycharm for anything "serious", but with v0.5 and the plugins above (among others) I just use Neovim for everything.

The downside is that, because it's all very new and in alpha/beta state, the documentation isn't too thorough and things occasionally might break. But personally I haven't had any trouble with breakage, and the default plugin configurations do mostly what I want with only minimal fiddling. And if you're on Mac you don't even have to download a tarball and read the build instructions, just `brew install --head neovim`.

Neovim v0.5 is leaving Vim in the dust IMO. It's more like a Lua-powered LSP/DAP/Treesitter-based IDE engine than a text editor. Except it's also just a text editor and it still opens in less than 1 second.

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