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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Vim seems to be default installed on most Linux distributions, and Emacs isn't. If your work takes you across Linux servers, you're 99% sure to be "a Vim user" (in some capacity), regardless of what your daily programming environment is.

I prefer Emacs to Vim, but I prefer Idea for Java development over either, so since I mostly work on java projects on Linux servers, I actually use Vim significantly more than Emacs.

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Interesting that you feel you can use Vim to write Java. I love Vim, really. It's my most favorite editor of all time. But for Java I wouldn't want to miss the auto-complete, auto-import, debugging and fuzzy search features of an IDE.

To play devil's advocate, it's possible to get a lot of those features in vim, see

- https://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/

- https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim

- etc

Anything else can quite easily be added via more plugins or by using a terminal multiplexer like tmux or screen (or a more complicated terminal like terminator, iTerm2, etc

I use vim/tmux exclusively for my development, and while I don't use Java, I don't feel that I'm missing features that my coworkers running atom/vscode/etc have. I will admit that stepping through a debugger might be a bit harder, but I seem to find a few debugger plugins around, so I'm guessing someone has solved that.

At the time I checked it, YouCompleteMe under the hood was running headless Eclipse as background for its features. So for me it was even worse than using the IDE directly. Now instead of one lightweight tool I had two tools to do the job of one.

If you are programming in Java most of the time. Vim and Emacs are both ruled for any serious work. Its just not possible to deal with that much verbosity without an IDE like Eclipse or IntelliJ.

Vim and Emacs are editors for languages where you do more thinking and less writing.

I'm sorry if that was unclear, but I explicitly prefer IntelliJ Idea over either Vim or Emacs. I'm sure you can write Java in either, but, no, certainly not willing to give up on the auto-stuff.

There’s a VIM plug-in that lets you have the best of both worlds.

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