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Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#81

Post by rstagi »

redlewel wrote: post #22

How are you a heavy vim user if you wonder if vim makes sense with ai? There are so many things to do outside of writing code that vim is used for. Also neovim + claude code + open terminal pane in tmux is the goated combo anyway. Especially more lately you need to understand the code you are writing if you want to do anything important in software, and the best way to do that is neovim :)

neovim + claude code + open terminal is exactly my setup! But all the heavy lifting I used to do simply I’m not doing it anymore. I spend most of the time creating new worktrees and reviewing code, and I guess I’m just not interested about the implementation details that much (not that I don’t look at the code, but minor styling things I just ignore them right now) I’m transitioning to this new way of work btw, so I still haven’t made up my mind. That’s why I asked for someone else opinion here :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#83

Post by locknitpicker »

PaiDxng wrote: post #82

Editing speed was never the moat — navigation was. I read far more diffs than I write code now, and vim motions are still how I get through them fast.

> Editing speed was never the moat — navigation was.

This. Also, ergonomics. With vi bindings you can navigate anywhere in a document without moving your hands away from the keyboard. As a neat consequence, you see any repetitive strain injury magically vanish.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#84

Post by mirmor23 »

cryo32 wrote: post #27

I’m not using any AI. A lot of us aren’t. Vim has done me well for 30 years so I’m not going to throw that away to sharecrop on someone else’s land.

'a lot us' you say? just speak for yourself so at least you will sound confident; all you've demonstrated here is your ignorance of LLM, and those who use it, and you amplify that by throwing silly examples to prove your ignorance.

llm usage or not, code browsing/refactor etc still need human usable tools like vim/git/tmux etc.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#87

Post by qup »

stvltvs wrote: post #72
MantisShrimp90 wrote: post #21

(Neo)vim is setup wonderfully for this era. Im with Justin on the take that neovim can replace tmux soon literally all that is left is being able to restart terminal sessions on restart (which is even set as a goal for summer of code). Neovim can already have all the agents running in different terminal buffers or there are plugins popping up every day to have deep integrations with your favorite or we even have some…

Any tips on how to switch from Tmux to pure neovim?

I have one: don't.

Tmux is basically perfect software. It gets right out of your way.

It'll never come out of my development stack, or workflows.

Writing code isn't everything. Almost every time I start an apt command or something that might run a little while, I regret it if I'm not in a tmux session.

I could sooner do without vim than tmux.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#88

Post by qup »

simianwords wrote: post #66
jillesvangurp wrote: post #39

I've barely touched Intellij for the last half year or so. I rarely edit code manually at this point. I also did not renew my subscription and am back on the community edition. I've noticed that my preferences for tools and languages is shifting as well. I'm happy to work with stuff that I previously would have not touched now because it would take me too long to get up to speed with languages, frameworks, etc. That…

I’m still not exactly at the point where I don’t need the IDE. I still like Idea products for their indexing and navigation - I’m just used to them. Codex doesn’t yet do a good job showing diffs nicely. Nor with navigation. I agree I reach out to the IDE less and less now.

Just change the idea that vim is the IDE. It's tmux/terminal. That gives you access to thousands of tools right inside your IDE.

There's a ton of tools for viewing diffs. I just pipe the diff into a viewer with vim-style navigation.

Finding files in vim is great, with the "ctrl+p" plug-in .

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#90

Post by dadoomer »

redlewel wrote: post #22

How are you a heavy vim user if you wonder if vim makes sense with ai? There are so many things to do outside of writing code that vim is used for. Also neovim + claude code + open terminal pane in tmux is the goated combo anyway. Especially more lately you need to understand the code you are writing if you want to do anything important in software, and the best way to do that is neovim :)

> neovim + claude + tmux is the goated combo

It absolutely is. I don't really understand why people still confine themselves to a full IDE when doing "agentic programming".

Especially with neovim with something like fzf or ctrl-p, which lets just quickly navigate codebases. This is about as far as you need to go. So to me, being terminal-first and being able to do multiple things at once makes more sense (hence tmux).

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