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Comment by rolisz | Hacker News Reader

I was a hardcore vim user 10 years ago, but now I just use PyCharm to work. I'm paid to solve problems, not to futz around with vim configs.

Can you make vim work roughly the same way? Probably you can get pretty close. But how many hours do I have to sink into the config? A lot. And suddenly the PyCharm license is cheap.

And it's exactly the same thing with LLMs. You want hand crafted beautiful code, untainted by AI? You can still do that. But I'm paid to solve problems. I can solve them faster/solve more of them? I get more money.

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> I was a hardcore vim user 10 years ago, but now I just use PyCharm to work. I'm paid to solve problems, not to futz around with vim configs.

The reason I don't like those arguments is that they merge two orthogonal stuff: Solving problems and optimizing your tooling. You can optimize PyCharm just as much you can fiddle with Vim's config. And people are solving with problems with Vim just as you do with an IDE. It's just a matter of preference.

In my day job, I have two IDEs, VSCode, and Emacs open. I prefer Emacs to edit and git usage, but there's a few things that only the IDEs can do (as in I don't bother setting emacs to do the same), and VSCode is there because people get dizzy with the way I switch buffers in Emacs.

>The reason I don't like those arguments is that they merge two orthogonal stuff: Solving problems and optimizing your tooling. You can optimize PyCharm just as much you can fiddle with Vim's config.

But you’re ignoring that the “optimizing tooling” is for the goal of making it easier for you. Its spending time now to decrease time spent in the long term.

I spent over a decade with Emacs as my sole editor and have since spent over a decade with PyCharm. Day 1 of PyCharm already had practically everything that it took a decade to get working for Emacs, and more. It was pre-optimized for me, so I was able to spend more time working on my code. Did I need to spend time optimizing Emacs? No. But doing so added intellisense and the ability to jump around the codebase very quickly. You _can_ spend just as much time optimizing Emacs, but I didn’t _have_ to in order to get the same result. Or have I spent that much time optimizing it since, for even more functionality.

If I may ask, why didn't you just use any available emacs config with python support? There are plenty on github, and ofc there's doom emacs, spacemacs, and probably others.

I can tell you in my case it was because I did want to play with emacs and get my hands dirty. But that does shift the blame to me since it's hardly fair to blame emacs for being so extensible and fun.

I did. I’ve done that and tried them all (granted this was a decade+ ago where the landscape was probably different). But there were all lacking full IDE features like what PyCharm gave me.

Emacs is not a python oriented IDE. So the comparison is moot from the beginning. Some people likes what Emacs offers and mesh it with external tools. Some prefers a more complete package. Nothing wrong with either, especially if you have the time and the knowledge to iterate quicly on the first.

What you may need is something others can do without. So what’s best is always subjective.

Sure.

I think it’s odd for you to criticize someone’s reasons when you apparently just reject their underlying premise to begin with (which is, effectively, my experience with a particular open source tool isn’t the best for me and the one I found that does isn’t open source).

Frankly, the idea of having 4 different ways of editing code, as you’ve described above, just seems like a nightmare to me. I like to have one tool that does it all and learn to use that tool well. The Jetbrains tooling allows me to do this with little of my time spent configuring it.

If what you are using works well for you, then I think we should all be happy here.

The point I was making was against conflating optimizing tooling and wasting time not solving problems. Not about going with an IDE or not.

Everyone works differently. For most tasks, I prefer Emacs. But for pairing, VS code may be more familiar to others. And it’s hard to get rid of Android Studio and XCode if you’re doing mobile development.

No one can judge workflow and tooling choices as long as the results are in.

Indeed. I've been a vim user for almost two decades, and it's been a long, long time since I"ve had to spend time solving problems/optimizing my tooling. Yes it was a big up front investment, but it's paid off immensely. I don't think I'm anything special so please don't misunderstand this as a brag, but I routinely have people enjoy "watching" me use vim because I can fly around the codebase with lightning speed, often times I can have already followed code paths through several files before VS code is even loaded and ready to work on my coworkers machine. The only problem is for whatever reason if I know somebody is watching, I sometimes get stage fright and forget how to use vim for a few seconds at at time :-D

What kind of crappy machines do your coworkers have? VS code takes 2-3 seconds at most for me to load.

They mostly have macbooks (I think either M1 or M2?). I don't know if they are loaded with extensions or something that adds time to it, but it definitely takes longer than 2-3 seconds

Yes, PyCharm has settings, but I've barely touched them. In 99% of the cases, the out of the box experience just works. Can't exactly say that about vim (or emacs).

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