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Switching from Vim to Intellij

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Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#41
I switch from Vim to IntelliJ and then back multiple times every day - one is for fast editing of smaller codebases and the other is for sprawling codebases. One thing I've noticed about IntelliJ though (and any other IDE), is that eventually I manage to get the thing configured into some inconsistent state that I can't figure out how to get out of and I have to restart everything from scratch before I can get things working again - up to and including deleting the entire IDE and reinstalling it. The bad thing about command-line editing is that it doesn't do any magic for you. The nice thing is that it doesn't do any magic to you.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#42

I was thinking there might be something interesting here. Then I got to this line: "I started a new job working on a large typescript React project. Vim couldn’t handle opening a TSX file larger than 50 lines without crashing." And I was like LOL WUT? The author's case in this regard woudl be stronger if they helped us understand what was actually going wrong. Bad plugins? Conflicting macros? I'm pretty sure that sim…

Indeed, I routinely edit files in vim that are many GBs in size.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#43
post #3

I switched from vim to Webstorm, which is based on IntelliJ. I agree with most of this article. IdeaVim is a pretty good vim emulator (although not perfect, but none of them are). There's something to be said by having sane defaults that do exactly what you want. Probably my biggest issue with vim is you can easily find yourself in no man's land because your setup inevitably becomes uniquely your own. For example I u…

Totally agree with your point. Tools that allow great personalization are obviously more prone to generate weird problems unless you know what you're doing™. Or to quote a famous philosopher "With great power comes great responsibility".

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#44

I was thinking there might be something interesting here. Then I got to this line: "I started a new job working on a large typescript React project. Vim couldn’t handle opening a TSX file larger than 50 lines without crashing." And I was like LOL WUT? The author's case in this regard woudl be stronger if they helped us understand what was actually going wrong. Bad plugins? Conflicting macros? I'm pretty sure that sim…

Well, the thing about Vim and Emacs is that the users are expected to figure out configuration problems like these. That's not a point in favor of Vim and Emacs.

Right -- the argument here isn't against Vim per-se, but the entire ecosystem of plugins and configuration that's needed to work and be productive.

Sure, there are a bunch of choices for you to use... but now you have another problem -- there are a bunch of choices.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#45
Little off topic, but it unfortunate that the ultimate edition doesn’t include C/C++ and I have to buy yet another pack of “all products” to get that. I pay out of pocket and have yearly subscription. Not sure if the next thing they make for, say Rust, will be yet another thing to buy

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#46
post #21

I recently switched from IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate to VS Code for Go development (side project), because I don't want to pay for it, when I'm no longer a student. With Golang VS Code works great after getting used to it. The Go plugin is not available for the community edition. For Java and Android development I always used (and still use) IDEA because it's feels much better than Eclipse.

VS Code for Go is really good, your move makes total sense.

I was a happy VS Code user (after being a happy VIM user for a while) until I switched jobs from Go codebase to Ruby and then I quickly jumped back to IntelliJ. So far (for me) this is the only editor that correctly figures out most of the definitions and locations of methods/classes/etc.

Intellij IDEA is my go-to tool when working with the dynamic beast Ruby.

Well, actually Intellij IDEA is my overall go-to tool, also now when I work with Go again mostly.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#47

Just a warning, jetbrains has a huge marketing team. I pretty much can't read anything on the internet about jetbrains without thinking about it being questionable.

That's not a warning, it's a random insinuation. Take a look at

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#48

I have been using Jetbrains IDEs for a long time now, started with PyCharm and made my way through Webstorm to CLion for uni. It's great, but the RAM cost has been too high for me. I've been slightly switching the opposite way, using vim more and more for smaller stuff and opening the IDE only for larger projects or work stretches. I definitely love the value of vim as a nifty tool, my workflow is noticeably faster.…

As for ram usage, I currently have two huge java projects open, and three elm/frontend projects with all the shared packages opened as modules, and it's about 5GB. While it's certainly more than a text editor (still less than chrome lol), is it really so bad? My laptop got 64GB of ram and 34GB of those are sitting unused and 8GB is just cache. I actually prefer it to use more ram than having to recompute stuff or load from disk.

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#49

I wrote a similar comparison here: https://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/17/programmer-productivity-e... I've got to say that I am still solidly in the IntelliJ IDEA camp.

I've been using JetBrains tools since 2004/2005, and I've become so attached at the hip to IDEA, CLion, etc. that it has become hard for me to work in anything else. And it's really bitten me recently because the codebase I work in (C++, Chromium based) just won't index in CLion, it's so massive that CLion just pukes. That and with my remote work situation I'm really down to mostly using CLI tools, so it's back to Emacs (which I like, and have made work for me, but it's ... not the same)

I fear someday having to do job interviews and having to get up on a whiteboard or use some half-assed shared-coding IDE, because my fingers and eyes, they really want JetBrains products there... I don't type out for-loops, I use generators, etc. etc. it's all so much faster...

Re: Switching from Vim to Intellij

#50
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the thing about Vim and Emacs is that the users are expected to figure out configuration problems like these. That's not a point in favor of Vim and Emacs.

Right -- the argument here isn't against Vim per-se, but the entire ecosystem of plugins and configuration that's needed to work and be productive. Sure, there are a bunch of choices for you to use... but now you have another problem -- there are a bunch of choices.

Exactly. If you argue the pros of vim/emacs using the power that comes with access to extensibility functionalities, it seems intellectually hishonest to not consider the ecosystem and customization issues also for the cons.
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