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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

Neo(lazy)vim user here.. not sure what I'm missing from IDE...

Language server, check, Plugin ecosystem, check, Running tests on demand, check. lua sucks but that's an acceptable compromise as vimscript is worse.

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I was neovim in the end, 100% agree lua is so much better than vimscript, but now I don't need either. I spend no time trying to match what an IDE can do in the terminal and get to spend that time building the things I'm actually interested in. I recalled Linus saying the reason he (at the time) used Fedora was because it just worked and he could spend his time on the kernel instead of tinkering to get linux working. This is one of the biggest reasons I stopped using (neo)vim

I had lots of problems with plugins in the ecosystem breaking, becoming incompatible with others, or often falling into unmaintained status. Integrations with external SaaS services are much better too

Also information density (and ease of access) as a peer comment has mentioned

> match what an IDE can do in the terminal and get to spend that time building the things

This is a common complaint but I haven't done any setup for months.. And installing a language server because I need to write typescript is just <leader>cm and then lllll on the servers I need.

Mice are good and the terminal doesn't make the best use of the information density possible on modern displays.

You can use a mouse with a terminal. Also one could argue that you opt into your own level of information density.

My experience is the opposite. Terminal UIs make better use of information density because they don’t have ridiculous padding between widgets and other graphical chromes that modern GUIs have.

Also terminals support mice. Have done for literally decades.

Ultimately though, it just boils down to personal preference

Modern terminal emulators run at native resolution and support window splitting. You can have the exact same information density (I'd argue that a nice neovim environment has more information density than most IDEs since vs code and jetbrains seem to love putting extra space and padding everywhere now.)

Terminal emulators can only do exactly that. Emulate increasingly large terminals. They are almost fundamentally unable to render something smaller than a single character.

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