Comment by norir
1 year ago
I program in neovim with no plugins, no autocomplete and no syntax highlighting. I type everything myself (though I will use copy and paste from time to time). There is a discipline to it that I find very beneficial. As a language designer, it also makes me think very carefully about the syntactic burden of languages that I design. It keeps my languages tight. One of the nice things about typing all of my own code without suggestions is that it eliminates many distractions. I may get some things wrong from time to time, but then I only have myself to blame. And I never waste time messing around with broken plugin configs or irritating syntax highlighting nits.
It's not for everyone but I love it.
I program most languages like this, in emacs.
Yeah these features are overrated. You can still autocomplete based on existing words in the same file by pressing Ctrl+N, but otherwise just typing it out or copying is totally OK.
I've also experienced autocomplete in NetBeans IDE so slow that it was just faster to type it out.
I quite value syntax highlighting though. Back then I used Turbo Pascal 5.5 on PC XT because it was way faster and less demanding than Turbo Pascal 6.0, but I remember not having a syntax highlighting was quite worse experience. You could get used to do without though.
But it also depends on the language. I've seen some Lua code without syntax highlighting and it was just a soup of words, very unreadable. Whereas something like C with symbols is OK.