Comment by mixedmath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixedmath | Hacker News Reader

This seems to hold pretty well. I've been using vim for approximately 15 years now too and my current setup and preferences are surprisingly similar to those in this post.

There is a certain organizational aspect here that I think is important to emphasize: the given paradigm is that vim is a text editor forming one part of the design environment. Assembling this environment inside a tmux session is particularly easy and powerful. And plugins can add some quality of life.

In addition, I also like the vim-slime plugin. All this does is facilitate sending lines/regions/blocks to a REPL (or in principle, any tmux pane). It's similar to the tmux send-keys function described in the OP.

A different paradigm of vim use is growing in popularity, which is the transform vim into a full IDE on its own.

I’d say that vim will never be an IDE as such, because the focus is on personal configuration. Personal Development Environment is how one of the neovim contributors is half rebranding it. The things that make modern IDEs good (like LSP) at all available but you get to shape them how you want, rather than being forced into your IDE of choices way of doing things.

(I imagine from your comment that you are probably aware of all this already)

Vim will never be an IDE because it does not aim to be one. It's a text editor - a central component of development environment, but only a component.

I really like the "PDE" term - it gives us a simple division: IDE is when program ships all components by default (hence the "integrated" in the name), PDE is when you yourself attach components of your liking (hence "personalized").

Personally I think Vim has been an IDE for at least 10-15 years now. You could argue for a long time about the exact definitions of "IDE" and "editor", but Vim can do compile-cycle, completion, finding identifiers, file browsing, spelling checking, terminal window, debugger, scripting, and a bunch of other stuff out of the box, without plugins.

It certainly does these things different than your average IDE. Again, you could argue for a long time about what is or isn't an "IDE", but merely "editor" really does injustice to some of the more advanced features in Vim because it can do so much more than just "edit text", and "IDE" certainly seems a lot better of a fit than "editor".

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