Hacker News Reader

Comment by brootstrap | Hacker News Reader

Just wait for the vim guy who will be like "but muh java plugins make it more efficient then IntelliJ"...

I think i am more productive in an IDE, faster. Sure if you have this insane VI/EMACS setup that you have tuned for years. Good for you, you probably are a fucking wiz.

My standard right now is a terminal & IDE combo. Working in the cloud era as a data person, you need to be comfortable with terminal & vi/emacs (vi for me but whatevs) as it makes life a ton easier. I hate watching co-workers do terminal shit and write code. Seriously guys if you invest a little time into VI pretty soon you are flying around your code. People literally watch my screen and are like WTF are you doing. I feel like a surgeon with precise incisions, cuts, tweaks. Compare this to spamming down arrow 30 times and then right arrow 80 times to get to a character in your editor...

View on HN

> Sure if you have this insane VI/EMACS setup that you have tuned for years. Good for you, you probably are a fucking wiz.

To share a glimpse of the mindset of us on the editors side: that insane Emacs setup I've been tuning for years enables me to be "a fucking wiz" not just with Lisp. The very same setup lets me work efficiently with Python, Shell, configs, SQL databases, HTML+CSS+JS, running a personal Wiki, organizing tasks, tracking time spent on those tasks, billing customers for that time, reading/writing mail, and a bunch of other things. We love our editors because of compound interest - we get to reapply the same tricks to almost every task done on a computer (and we complain loudly when we can't shoehorn a task into editor-oriented workflow :)).

That said, I'll still grant you're better off with IntelliJ IDEA for Java. For the time being, at least. I'm having high hopes for language servers trend - they're the bridge that could enable vim and Emacs to reach feature parity in all the places they're currently deficient compared to IDEs.

> The very same setup lets me work efficiently with Python, Shell, configs, SQL databases, HTML+CSS+JS, running a personal Wiki, organizing tasks, tracking time spent on those tasks, billing customers for that time, reading/writing mail, and a bunch of other things. We love our editors because of compound interest.

I think that's really the takeaway here. Spending time in your environment allows you to accumulate skills that let you solve pretty much any text based problem you can think of.

Whether that's using emacs with elisp or vim with shell scripts and Unix tools isn't important. It's having that playground of an environment to solve arbitrary problems.

> Compare this to spamming down arrow 30 times and then right arrow 80 times to get to a character in your editor

Or uses the mouse to get there. I don’t get that part of vim. Weirdly I do like Vim. The thing is you see something in sublime, you just click on it and you there. You don’t have to solve some vim puzzles to get the cursor on the right spot.

GP isn't talking (just) about jumping between files or function definition. The difference between Vim and regular IDEs is this: in Vim, you notice an arbitrary piece of code on your screen, tap tap, you're there, tap tap, you've transposed it with another piece of code somewhere else in the file, tap tap, you're in another file, tap tap, you're back in the previous file, except it now contains half of the code from that other file, tap tap, now with proper namespacing. All done at the speed of thought - an experienced Vim/Emacs user thinks in semantic steps, not shortcuts. In regular keyboard+mouse approach, you either do operations that perfectly align with automated refactoring capabilities, or just have to click a lot.

> Just wait for the vim guy who will be like "but muh java plugins make it more efficient then IntelliJ"...

I think you described the base of most arguments in that direction right there. The problem to either side isn't so much what the other side's doing (who cares, really? To each their own…).

Usually, those discussions are fueled by people asserting how obviously the respective other side is inferior without having even had a proper look at it. My bias tells me there's much more of those on the IDE side, but I expect that's due to the way people are introduced to programming (if one "population" tends to be much bigger than the other, I suppose there's a higher chance of someone belonging to it starting a flamewar. And, of course, if it's also prone to have more newbies in it, the probability of… unaware statements also rises).

> I think i am more productive in an IDE, faster.

Personally agree with this part.

For those who need it because they are used to vim style editing most ides (at least on the Java side, + VS Code for everything else) has vim modes.

For those who have never used it and think they need it because it seems so cool and "everybody" uses it: You don't need it, at least not right now. Most great developers I know actually don't use vim for programming high-level languages, even if some of them use vim modes.

Instead I'd recommend:

- Use a decent mainstream IDE

- Memorize shortcuts for selection, search, replace, global search, global search and replace.

- Learn to use the included refactoring tools

- Learn to use the built in VCS tooling (or try and fall back to the console for VCS handling).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com