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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

> The value of Vim/Emacs isn't the modal editing or key chords. It's the community and architecture

These are empty words that have no meaning. I don't use my IDE for "community" or for "architecture". I use my IDE for writing code, navigating code, finding code, refactoring code, exploring unknown code bases, analyzing code, moving code around, reading code...

How many of those things have the words "community and architecture" in them?

> you have to wait for JB to implement features that (neo)vim have already implemented

You mean the other way around. Nothing NeoVim implements trumps the depth and breadth of features IDEA offers out of the box. NeoVim (and others like vim and emacs) is busy re-creating, with great delay and poorly, a subset of a subset of features of a modern IDE.

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When I joined FAANG #1, JetBrains wasn't an option, and all of our work had to be done on remote servers, with code bases big enough that indexing took on the order of hours. Meanwhile there have been internal communities at all of my companies for Vim and Emacs to make them work in these environments, write plugins for various company services, etc. None of the editors or IDEs we are talking about struggle with any of the common tasks you mentioned, what something like Vim allows is extensibility and portability, and communities that support it no matter where you need to use it.

I do believe that for some use cases, like a person who unfortunately only works with Java or Android, JetBrains makes sense and is probably your only option. I believe outside of those environments, JetBrains offers no tangible benefits and plenty of downsides - cost, resource consumption, can't be run in a terminal, not easy to work with remote machines.

By the way, vim already has built in support for cscope, ctags, autocomplete, terminal windows, gdb debugging, if you work on a C-like project, it already is an IDE. With one plugin (Ale) which takes one line of config, you get an actual IDE that can auto-detect LSPs which offers refactoring, code actions, etc. that is the exact same you would get in an IDE. But for very large projects, I have found that CLion and Clangd both take far too long to index, and so having an editor that works without indexing is a huge plus.

> I do believe that for some use cases, like a person who unfortunately only works with Java or Android,

Your bias is showing through :)

If people had less bias and actually looked at what an IDE can and does offer, they wouldn't be dismissive with "oh, if we just add these 12 plugins and an integration, then for this on particular language we may have a full IDE" (in actuality, a subset of a subset of all features an IDE offers).

> With one plugin (Ale) which takes one line of config, you get an actual IDE that can auto-detect LSPs which offers refactoring, code actions, etc. that is the exact same you would get in an IDE.

Looking at the "huge" list of features that Ale lists consisting of 6 very basic things, I again see that people who use vim have never ever in their life used a proper IDE.

> and so having an editor that works without indexing is a huge plus.

This I can actually agree with :) Indexing is often such a pain

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