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Comment by ducktective | Hacker News Reader

So, I sometimes read comments such as "I use vim/nvim for everything but for debugging I use VSCode/IntelliJ". I mean, how does that work out? Debugging is something that may come up anytime while coding, you just fire up an IDE and only use it for debugging? Then why not go the extra mile and use the already open IDE for writing code?

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Because everything else about coding that is not debugging is arguably better in vim/nvim.

I'm one of those. A happy user of IDEs for a decade, but after trying and embracing vim/nvim all the IDEs now feel slow, bloated and clunky. Even with vim/nvim plugins.

I'm one of those people. It depends on the use case. VSCode has a plugin to use a Neovim instance behind the scenes, complete with supporting (some) plugins and configurations. At work I exclusively use this, since it has debugging support and is more in line with my coworkers are using. At home, where I'm writing in a wider array of languages and often haven't bothered setting up a debugging environment for many projects, I use mainly Neovim.

For me, Vim's built in termdebug works just fine. But I still prefer to debug out of the editor, as I often need to combine multiple tools (strace, radare2, scripting scenarios to inject packets and coordinate multiple devices, etc) and the debuggers built into IDEs are quite limited in this regard.

If I cannot automate it then it is useless.

Last summer there was an interview with John Carmack where he talked about the weirdness of developers in large organizations like Google clinging to Vim or other terminal based editors and how the game developers would embrace every tool that makes their life easier. That where I just gave up and switched to VSCode, because he's right. I have one exception, because I CANNOT figure how to get VSCode to handle our Puppet syntax.

It's weird, because I used to work as a .Net developer, using Visual Studio, but I completely forgot how efficient is it to just be able to set a break point.

> how the game developers would embrace every tool that makes their life easier

That's just not true. Plenty of game developers use old tools as well, with the exact same argument of "it makes my life easier"

There's not even a nugget of truth to this statement, it's just generalization nonsense.

As convincing the good old appeal to authority may sound for some, it still remains only one thing - a fallacy. There is nothing making me more productive in VSCode and I can set break points in neovim just fine.

I do this regularly. It takes a second for the code to update from the file system as you switch windows, and it takes me very little time to save that second back with my vim chops. If intellij's vim emulation actually worked reliably and quickly I would just switch, but it doesn't. :-/

I just use CLI based debuggers. Sure they are hard to setup, but I appreciate the low level knowledge I acquire to set them up. Most engineers I have met don’t even understand how to build everything from the ground up, so when shit hits the fan, they are left scratching their head.

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