Comment by eloisius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloisius | Hacker News Reader

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Same here except that each year it seems like I shed a plug-in that I’m not using anymore. Over the last decade I’ve been told over and over whenever I join a new team that Vim isn’t going to cut it and I should switch to the current hotness. Invariably, I give the new hotness an honest shake and can’t suffer the productivity hit. My favorite is when someone promises me that the “vim bindings” are actually really good.

What I think people don’t get is that it’s not just Vim. You can add hjkl to another editor and it doesn’t make a difference. The terminal is my IDE. I run vim within tmux side by side with a shell, and I’m way faster at grepping for something than IntelliJ is at indexing and searching. My editor never has a few-second lockup. I never depend on the IDE to build my code, so when I work on something there’s a functioning Makefile or equivalent and it’s inherently ready to build and test on CI.

I don’t care about Vim vs emacs. I’m sure emacs is great if you’ve invested in it like I have vim. But contrary to all the IDEs and editors I’ve been urged to switch to over the last ten years, vim is still kicking and I keep getting better with it. If I adopted the new hotness every few years that wouldn’t be the case. You can pry vim from my cold dead fingers.

What Jetbrains provides, and is quite hard to replicate, is the linting and auto-correct suite for medium/large/enterprise development teams.

That's actually the main thing, deep and wide integrated linting.

Almost everyone does autocompletion (up to a point).

Almost no one does linting as well as they do.

Quick experiment for you.

Take a big source code file you've worked on, preferably solo, so you won't have excuses :-p Not a "best case scenario" file you've cleaned up and polished. Be honest with yourself, something big and reasonably messy where the deadline was tight or the issue was complex.

Open the entire project and configure it in a Jetbrains product.

Open that specific file in the IDE.

My guess is that the top-right green checkmark won't be there.

You just can't hold all that stuff in your head at all times.

That's why we use computers and tools (such as advanced IDEs), to remind us of this stuff.

Anyway, in the rare case that you actually do all of that on your own, <<you>> are an outlier. 1%, 10%, for sure you're not lower than 50% of developers. The majority of developers need that help.

That's an expensive experiment to try, so I probably won't do it, but what does the green arrow checkmark mean? That my code lints? I use Syntastic most of the time, which just runs a linter like flake8 and then puts a red arrow next to offending lines. It runs every time I save, and I generally take its feedback right away because the slight shift to the right when the arrows are present nudges me to fix them.

Definitely not saying anyone else should use Vim if they don't want to, just that Vim is part of my productivity superpower and I take offense to it when part of the onboarding experience is setting up an IDE and someone really pushes it on me.

Yes, the green checkmars means that the code is lint-free (up to a point).

The Jetbrains linters are proprietary, though they can integrate Open Source ones, and generally better and more thorough than Open Source ones. They're especially better for professional development where you use various frameworks.

> I take offense to it when part of the onboarding experience is setting up an IDE and someone really pushes it on me.

That's fine, but being a part of a team sometimes requires sacrifices. It's as true in football as it is in software engineering :-)

Plus I'm sure reasonable teams just leave you alone if you do your job well and your setup doesn't intrude on what everyone else is doing.

> That's fine, but being a part of a team sometimes requires sacrifices. It's as true in football as it is in software engineering :-)

It's only fine if this provides something to the team which you could not provide otherwise and in my experience this is not the case usually.

For my day job I mostly write Go. There are tons of great linters you can use with golangci-lint e.g. which is easy to integrate into Vim. I wouldn't see any benefit of using Jetbrains here.. maybe it is true for other languages that don't have good community linters but I think there are not many of these..

I was about to say that. I used to work with python/django and pycharm really does a lot of heavy lifting on the autocomplete/linting part. It knows django and would autocomplete even django's ORM params (which are quite dynamic).

Now I moved to Go, and that is not needed anymore. Most thing are already bultin or can easely be extended (like with golangci-lint). It's static typed with simple OO model which makes things a lot easier. Since then I've been working neovim and I don't feel I miss anythig from full-featured IDE.

Many languages have linters and formatters.

That is what you should use. You can't run Intellij IDEs on CI to validate the pull request.

That said, I do appreciate the powerful code analysis provided by Jetbrains IDEs.

That's the problem Qodana is trying to solve: https://www.jetbrains.com/qodana/

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