Comment by nineplay

2 years ago

Mileage varies, even the most ardent vim user I know gave up and switched to VS Code this year. It's just too much to try to keep up with when projects and technologies change. I've programmed in C++, Go, Python, Java, and Angular just in the last year. I can believe that there's vim plugins to handle all those, but the energy it would take to find auto-complete and navigation and formatting and debugging and any number of other out-of-the-box IDE functionality is more than I'd like to thing about. Then there's the associated tools - Kubernetes yamls, swagger, markup, Makefiles. In IDEs they are only one plugin download away.

I love vim, I used it exclusively for years when I was doing C/C++. I still ssh into servers a lot and use it pretty much daily. Still, I'm far to lazy to try to turn it into my full time development environment .

5 comments

nineplay

Reply
bheadmaster  2 years ago

> I can believe that there's vim plugins to handle all those, but the energy it would take to find auto-complete and navigation and formatting and debugging and any number of other out-of-the-box IDE functionality is more than I'd like to thing about.

Well, I'll be the bearer of the good news, then!

NeoVim has a native LSP client which unifies all auto-complete/navigation/formatting into a single plugin, only requiring you to install per-language LSP server.

As for debugging, there's also DSP (Debug Server Protocol) which NeoVim doesn't have native support for, but there's a plugin for that.

  • josephg  2 years ago

    There’s more to language support than LSP.

    I use vscode and IntelliJ these days. In rust, IntelliJ lets me rename functions and variables across my entire project. Or select a few lines of code and extract them into their own function. It’ll even figure out what arguments the function needs and call it correctly.

    I’m writing a paper at the moment using vscode and typst (a modern latex replacement). The vscode plugin shows me the resulting rendered pdf live as I type. I can click anywhere I want to edit in the pdf and the editing window will scroll to the corresponding source text.

    Maybe there’s ways to do all this stuff in vim but I never found it. I used vim on and off for 20 years and I barely feel any more productive in it than when I was 6 months in. As far as I can tell, IntelliJ is both easier to learn and more powerful.

    Making nontrivial software in vim just doesn’t feel productive. LSP is the tip of a big iceberg of features.

    • christophilus  2 years ago

      The rename across the project scenario is a LSP feature that Neovim supports. I use it frequently. I do miss the ability to trivially extract a function. I used to do that all the time in Visual Studio back in my C# days.

      1 reply →