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AinaJ
AinaJ

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Why I decide to use vim in 2021

Why I decide to use vim in 2021

When I first learn programming my teacher use vi to teach us.
That was a horrible experience for me. I see it so difficult and even not obvious:

why do I need to hit i before I can insert text?

I know there is many text editors that makes life easy. So why should I use vi or vim.

Modern IDE takes a lot of memories

I used so many IDE like Eclipse, Boa and VS Code. VS Code is great and so powerful. These last two years I use it in my daily life as programmer.
But times come when I need to debug multiple microservices. I need to run at least 4 microservices and a desktop application. In addition to that docker desktop should run some service like database, rabbitMQ, redis. Then my PC start to slow down and time to time it blocked because memory is almost full.

Looking at the task manager I start to kill every process that I don't really need. But not too much progress. Then I notice that VS Code takes really many memories when debugging. I switch to eclipse, but it takes even more memory.
I was so frustrated because I can not get my work done.

Why I decide to try vim

Questions start to fill my mind:

why modern IDE take so many memories on my computer?

Do I really need to take so much memory to write code?

Peoples in a decade before doesn't even have half of my memory to get their work done.
But they manage to write great software. Some even build OS that we still use nowadays.

Then I remember my teacher using vi for programming.
Is vi really lightweight? Can it be used as an IDE?

I start to experiment vim as it is an improved version of vi. And many used it as an IDE.

Vim installed on my PC and with a great surprise it only takes less than 50Mb when debugging. It was configured with plugin like:

  • vimspector for debugging
  • Nerdtree for file browsing
  • FZF coupled with Ag/Rg for search
  • vim-fugitive for git.

So I decide to learn and use vim each day I put my hand on computer.
I manged to get my work done as my PC doesn't block anymore.

Conclusion

Modern IDE are great and can make your daily job easy. But vim is still a tool that programmers should consider.
If you are like me who need to debug multiple program at the same time or need to debug on a server environment vim is probably the tool you need.
Although it takes time to master, believe me it can bring you a comfort you never saw before.

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