Vim After 15 Years (2017)

In terms of searching through multiple files, I use Telescope with ripgrep and fzf. It’s an insanely slick workflow that allows me to jump around code faster than anything else I’ve used in my last 25 years of coding.

I'm simply faster in it. I'd probably say the initial main attractor was modal editing (vim-mode plugins in Jetbrains are not my favorite - usually not a full implementation of the real features vim offers).

* For syntax highlighting: tree-sitter is as good, if not better in my experience.

* For auto-complete/navigation/etc: LSP support + a small few plugins solve this, running on par with what GoLand offers.

* Search support, like the case you mentioned - I use Telescope + Ripgrep and usually my searches are roughly the same time to process as GoLand did.

Are there other features that are drastically important? Because the other features Neovim offers over GoLand are:

* It's way faster to load. Indexing in GoLand takes so long. LSP servers do usually take a bit of time to index but this is on the order of minutes faster than GoLand takes for the projects I have to use at work.

* Significantly less memory consumption.

* I can be purely keyboard driven.

* Modal editing and all the niceties that come with that (note: emulators are always subpar in my experience).

* Being already in the terminal is a significant advantage, especially on my laptop screen (less-so on my ultrawide).

* Customizability is a lower priority, but it is still worth mentioning - there's only so much you can do to customize a Jetbrains editor.

I am far more productive using it than I ever was with GoLand. I might make the exception for IntelliJ when I used to do Kotlin work - but that's the exception, not the rule. For every other language I definitely prefer Neovim.

I think, like all tools, it's important to spend the time to learn it (if you desire to actually use it). Otherwise, of course vim will just look like some archaic tool that seems like it lacks all modern support.

What features does a "proper IDE" offer that, at least Neovim, does not or cannot provide?

I've rarely had a problem with search, I can type `:grep [some regex]` and I'm quickly shown all matches for that regex in the entire project. I admit I'm not sure how I would do a more complicated query, but this is almost always enough, what kinds of queries do you do which this doesn't cover? There's just one exception, I'm currently working in a codebase where members have very generic names, `Nonce` is a valid field name for a number of different structs, which makes search results for `Nonce` tedious to work through. For this situation I've added a keybinding which calls semgrep and lets me view all references for a specific struct's `Nonce` field.

Calling out to semgrep is an instance of a more general pattern: Because vim is not integrated I lean on tools outside of vim when necessary. The `git` cli, especially once you add some aliases, gives fine access to file history and diffs.

The feature I'm most jealous of is debugger integration. `gdb` and `dlv` get the job done but it's really convenient to be able step through your code with the same interface you use to write it.

> There is also the point of being able to use vim bindings inside of the IDE

Every vim keybinding re implementation I've tried has been missing essential features. When I'm inside an IDE I spend much of my time typing and navigating. When I'm inside vim I'm _thinking_, and the necessary changes occur about as quickly as I decide upon them.