Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

The vscode vim bindings are atrocious. I use them because there's nothing better, but they're bad. Slow, super buggy, and did I mention slow? I hit tab and sometimes instead of inserting a \t, it inserts the letters "<tab>". And it re-runs mypy/flake8/etc whenever I enter or exit insert mode, which I do a ton... so my CPU is constantly pegged. And commands like "2d}" don't delete the correct amount of paragraphs. And one more I forgot: The undo stacks aren't synced between vscode and vscode-vim, so vscode's undo can undo an undo. <sighs>

I've reported all these bugs with not much in terms of answers. I've even tried contributing but it's a pretty messy codebase to get into. Ergh.

View on HN

What's the bug that you have with `2d}`? It seems to work fine for me.

There shouldn't be any reason that it reruns save upon entering/exiting insert mode; are you sure you don't have some kind of keybinding/other setting that's autosaving for you?

The `<tab>` issue is kind of a pesky race condition that's most likely exacerbated by VSCodeVim running slowly on your computer.

Speaking of it running slowly, I would argue against characterizing them as "slow". Some small subset of users seems to have consistently run into this issue, and a decently large subset of those users have realized that the issue is caused by some conflicting plugin, so I'd suggest trying that too.

As for the undo issue, I have mixed feelings about it. Perhaps it could be synced with VSCode, but it's definitely true that when it was first implemented, VSCode did not provide the flexibility to do so.

Overall, I do agree that there's stuff that can improved, but it kinda hurts to see people call them "atrocious". I suspect your main issue with VSCodeVim is really the "slowness" issue. I would try disabling other plugins and see whether it helps.

EDIT: Forgot to mention. Disclaimer: I'm one of the primary maintainers for VSCodeVim.

I use VSCodeVim every day and I just wanted to say thanks for your work. You made the switch to VSCode a lot easier for a lot of people.

Thanks for your work. I've been using vscodevim for a while and it works like a charm out of the box.

I'm sure the real Vim power-users might miss a whole bunch of stuff, but I consider myself an intermediate Vim user, and I think VSCodeVim is great. Almost all Vim commands I use seem to be supported. So thanks for your work :).

> Overall, I do agree that there's stuff that can improved, but it kinda hurts to see people call them "atrocious"

Sorry :( I hate to be harsh and I don't want this to get you down, because I have a lot of admiration for the work you do (and this goes to any open source work I've ever criticized, really). So, thank you for your work.

But... the usability is really bad. They would be completely fine in a vacuum if vim didn't exist, but the point of comparison exists and it's vim and vim is just crazy fast compared to vscode-vim, it's like comparing a racer... to a fighter jet.

> What's the bug that you have with `2d}`?

That only deletes one paragraph (like 1d}) instead of two. 3d} only deletes two, and so on. It's not consistent with vim.

> There shouldn't be any reason that it reruns save upon entering/exiting insert mode

shrug, I filed an issue about this a couple weeks ago after a decent bit of debugging.

> I suspect your main issue with VSCodeVim is really the "slowness" issue

ish, it's definitely the primary pain point but there's also lots of small bugs and inconsistencies with vim. And I understand that competing with vim itself is hard, but the other comparison point is for example pycharm's vim plugin and vscode's is far behind.

Edit: And just to echo tdfx's point, without your bindings I wouldn't even be on vscode, so there's that :)

I don't think the undo feature is built out well enough for it to be a great idea for you to switch to it. I tried to build an undo tree and saw that there is a granularity mismatch between the internal stack and yours. I think the API should be redesigned so that plugins can manage the undo stack but the team seems pressed on time so I gave up for the time being. The issue is still open so I'm hopeful they might come back to it.

Just want to say thank you for what you do. Contrary to this users experience I find the Vim bindings in VSCode to be probably the best I've ever used in any IDE. Keep up the good work.

I really appreciate your efforts in improving the Vim experience on VSCode, but the extension is slow enough that I find it unusable. I desperately check every changelog update to see if the performance issues have been mitigated, to no avail.

The author of vscodevim is working on a new extension that uses NeoVim's remote UI client protocol. Accuracy and speed will hopefully go way up when that is finished. Unfortunately progress appears to have stalled somewhat.

https://github.com/Chillee/VSCodeNeovim

I went back to "vanilla" NeoVim solely due to the slowness of the VSCode Vim plugin. Been watching the repo you linked a couple of times a month and always disheartened that nothing seems to happen.

Which extension do you use? I don’t use vim mode myself but I vaguely remember seeing a conversation about how, for some reason, the better vim plugin with the most favorites doesn’t appear on the top of the search results, and an inferior one is there instead.

This one: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevi...

I've tried just about every single one and the best one is still the main one. It gets better just about every release similar to VSCode. Not saying it's perfect, but with all of the other VSCode benefits I find it so much better for productivity than plain Vim.

I had similar problems. Certain key combinations in vscode would cause the cursor to delete or corrupt large sections of my code and delete the undo history. After losing hours of work a few times, I went back to Vim. I really like the process of customizing my editors and having them work the same on all machines, even remote servers. (Vim for coding, and Emacs/Evil for Org Mode.)

i agree with these observations

There is an upvote button so you can convey that appropriately :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com