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Discussion on: Who said that VIM cannot compete with IDEs?

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aghost7 profile image
Jonathan Boudreau

I think vim is meant to be used this way, especially if you look at the new features in vim 8.

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Rémy 🤖

I think it's a text editor from the early 90s, soooo... Not really. I'm not saying it's not capable of it, and actually I'm a heavy vim user but still, I'm not ready to spend time to match the feature level that PyCharm has out of the box.

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aghost7 profile image
Jonathan Boudreau

Linux is from the early 90's - does that mean it isn't meant to be utilized for modern purposes? I don't understand your reasoning.

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Rémy 🤖

Oh it certainly is not. In fact, it's designed to be not portable at all. And from a OS design standpoint it's not even standing out since there's a lot of better ideas implemented out there.

But some people managed to make it reasonably user-friendly out of the box (many distros, Android, TVs and much more). Which means I'm not spending hours setting it up because it's already done.

In the case of vim, it's not already done and although there is pre-made plugin packs and so on there is just so many pages of documentation to learn that it sounds like it's not worth it.

So let me correct what I said, vim is not made for that and nobody managed to make it fit with a reasonable amount of effort. Or at least the amount I'm ready to put in it.

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aghost7 profile image
Jonathan Boudreau • Edited

Oh it certainly is not. In fact, it's designed to be not portable at all.

Not be portable? What do you mean?

And from a OS design standpoint it's not even standing out since there's a lot of better ideas implemented out there.

Why should that even matter in this case? An OS should be boring.

So let me correct what I said, vim is not made for that and nobody managed to make it fit with a reasonable amount of effort. Or at least the amount I'm ready to put in it.

If you're looking to get vim running quickly there are plenty of distros out there like spacevim, janus, and spf13 which are for the most part plugin bundles. I don't understand why you're still saying vim is not "made" to be used like and IDE when its pretty clear from the creator of VIM that it is a goal.

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bezirganyan profile image
Grigor Bezirganyan

Well, I like to compare Vim and IDE like Arch Linux and Ubuntu. Ubuntu works out of the box, and for Arch Linux you need to configure everything from almost scratch. But after the time you spend you get slim and fast machine configured for your needs.

As it is not possible to say which one is better, Ubuntu or Arch, since for everyone its different, the same way you can not tell what will be better for a particular person, vim or IDE.

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Rémy 🤖

Regarding portability of Linux, I mean this.

Regarding Linux not standing out, I'm talking about containers, micro-kernel, next-gen file systems and so on. Look at Solaris or Plan 9 and you'll see that Linux is pretty late on many things.

My whole point is: if you love vim go for it, I don't care. But I personally think that it's not worth spending time learning this while there is muuuch simpler options out there and would certainly not recommend that to beginners.

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bezirganyan profile image
Grigor Bezirganyan • Edited

That's why I said, for every particular user it is different and you cannot say which one is better. If you like IDE, than use it, if you like vim/emacs, then use vim or emacs. They all are tools after all, what matters is the code you write with them.

This post wasn't to convince people to use vim instead of an IDE, but for people who like vim, but don't use it foe missing certain features :)

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pianocomposer321 profile image
pianocomposer321 • Edited

Regarding vim being an editor from the early 90's:

Windows is an OS from 1985. MacOS from 2001. Linux, as mentioned above, is from 1991. If none of that means anything to you, how about this - InteliJ IDEA is an IDE from 2001. Sounds pretty outdated to me ;-).

My point is, you can't judge how outdated something is by its initial release, but by its latest release. Vim's latest release was literally 6 hours ago. And the one before that, 8 hours. The one before that was less than an hour before the next one. Far from being outdated, vim is in very active development.

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Rémy 🤖

True enough :)