I don't want to use my valuable time learning how to get vim working in some super-optimal way that's hypothetically going to improve my productivity by 1%. JetBrains consistently works well enough for me that I'm not going to bother switching. 90% of my life is spent thinking about how to solve the problem so the editor is not the main constraint.
If a terminal-based workflow is not your thing it's a tougher sell.
A tool that can last a lifetime and be used for any programming language at that.
It's just a trade-off between optimizing for the short-term or the long-term.
I just don't see it? I spent a good 6 months only using vim to see if I could get it to stick. Then I took a year break. After the break I forgot nearly every shortcut I was using minus a select few. I never got to the point of even matching my efficiency in other editors, let alone surpassing them.
6 months alone is already more than what I would consider worth in regards to time spent learning a tool for the little gain I see it bringing over just using intuitive, albeit less efficient, alternatives.
I do think 6 months should be enough to see some benefit in your workflow (like ci" to delete everything between "" and go into insert mode or Ctrl-O to go back to the last place you jumped from).
But I guess it depends on how you practiced, and if you look at those 6 months I'm sure you'll see that the time spent on actually learning Vim (struggling to learn these efficient editing patterns) was much less than you'd think.
With a tool like Vim I don't think it's enough to just use it, but we need to put conscious effort into it to learn it properly.
Also, although historically that hasn't really been part of the Vim ethos (compared to Emacs at least), you're expected to mold your editor over time to suit your needs exactly.
In the same time period, I've watched plenty of my cohort jump between IDEs and "modern" editors as they come and go (jetbrains, visual studio, textmate, sublime text, vscode, the various storm ides, etc etc). They all have to put time and effort into getting comfortable and proficient in each of these environments. That time adds up to be more than my initial vim investment.
Now I'm one of those folks that likes to master my tools and craft my own tools as well, so I've continued to invest time in my vim mastery. The same argument applies here too: that time is cumulatively increasing my skill at the tool rather than getting to the same point with various tools (cf the old interviewing dilemma: does this person have 5 years of experience or 1 year of experience 5 times). It means that some years I don't spend any time thinking about my vim setup, and other years I'll throw a few hours at it - importantly, this happens when I want not when the tool decides to release a new version that breaks things, not when theres suddenly a new great thing I have to use to keep up.
In summary - from a time/effort efficiency point of view for the course of a career: vim wins because the tool was there when I started, and its still here long after the "better" alternatives have come and gone (or faded into obscurity).
* I mostly write Kotlin/Java for backend, desktop and Android projects. JB has that covered: Gradle integration, refactoring, navigation, dependency updates, documentation viewer, visual git log/diff/merge/rebase/blame, visual Android layout editor, visual JavaFX/Swing layout editors, run configurations, step through debugger that shows current variable state on top of my source code, all the android resource/variant stuff, test runners, trigger tests from source code, tool windows for docker (compose) or other services and probably much more.
* I do C/C++ development on some projects in Clion which has most of the stuff from above but :s/Gradle/CMake/g.
* Aside from the above I also use my IntelliJ Ultimate for Python, Ruby, Golang, Rust, Markdown, Mermaid graphs, Kubernetes yamls and Terraform hcl files, Lua and probably some more. All with the excellent IdeaVIM plugin so I have my modal editing and ex commands.
I gladly pay $600/year for all this. If I have to spend one day (likely more) on configuring vim/nvim to even do a subset of what I mentioned, then JB is cheaper.
So, that is why I switched from years of Vim use (and a couple years of Emacs before that) to JB and I haven't looked back. I don't see why I should artificially limit myself to vim/terminal only when JB+IdeaVIM gets me the best of both combined.
Different workflows.
Bonus: my window manager has similar keybindings these days
As you said, by the end of the workday I was very comfortable with basic vim use.
I'm a committed (neo)vim user, but I readily admit I only got over the hump because I thought it was cool and hardcore and typing is easy for me. There's no question it's been worth it for me, and I would argue it's probably worth it for most people and better for the software ecosystem as a whole (GUI tools don't compose), but still I think trying to say one's better than the other is too narrow a view.
Is it enough to know how to enter insert mode, make an edit, then save and quit? That's easy enough to learn in a weekend.
Or is it learn how to edit efficiently using the various vim commands? That will indeed take much longer than a weekend.
(Even getting it configured just the way you want to will probably take more than a weekend...)
That's Notepad level usage, you don't gain anything from it.
The basics are very simple. You just get used to formulate a (weird) sentence of what you want to do in your head, abbreviate it and then learn (or configure) the buttons.
Filter bubbles, dude. ;)
Everything is just a just for me ^^
So it's just a claim.
Every time i do pair programming, i always get the "wow how did you do that?!?" response. It's just SO much ahead of an IDE in so many ways. Modal editing (imho) is far superior to "just insert mode" style of text editing.
With neovim (and vim + coc before that) i get 95% of what an IDE could give me, and the last 5% (like some obscure refactoring stuff) is something is would probably never use.
TLDR. I think learning vim is like learning SQL. It's a cross language tool, that will massively benefit your entire career.
That's a bit of an overstatement, because I really do love vim/nvim and nvim integration isn't that good, but the fact is that adding a feature in nvim still means researching and configuring it where in something like VSCode you open a new filetype, it asks "do you want support for this file", click yes and you're ready to go. I can spend a few days trying to get vim to work in the way I want it for a specific filetype/framework, or I can get 90% of what I want from VSCode in 30 seconds and still have vim navigation and command support.
Sure, VSCode is a power hog and it's slow, but I make pretty good money so the cost of a more powerful development machine is trivial compared to the opportunity cost of doing all that research. Some years I really enjoy learning all about new ways to configure vim/nvim, but I recognize that it's really not an efficient use of my time, it's just been something I do more for fun.
For me a snappy editor experience, and vim in general, is about comfort, not optimizing for some theoretical top editing speed. I don't think I'd be a drastically worse programmer if I were forced to use windows notepad to edit code, I would just be more uncomfortable all the time.
After about a week of using vim it clicked and I knew I couldn't go back to Sublime Text.
As for VS Code, I do everything I can to keep Microsoft products out of my life.
Statements like this are common, but they confuse two usages: (a) learning vi/vim well enough in order to use it in any unix environment vs. (b) using vim with a complete plugin/config suite as a primary development IDE replacement tool.
The former is IMHO an essential unix skill, but it's incredibly inefficient to try to use core out-of-the-box zero-plugin vim as a primary development tool. But once you start configuring an efficient dev environment, the GUI editors start to really outshine vim, and they still provide core vim functionality via plugins if you want it.
What I really meant to convey is that I dipped my toes in just enough to get familiar, and that was enough for me to get fully hooked on vim. I've spent lots of time trying to make Jetbrains/IdeaVim and VSCode/vim-plugin work for how I write code. Significantly more than I want to admit publicly...but I come back to the boring old terminal every time.
I am not trying to convince any person on this planet that they should use vim. In fact, when other developers at work ask me if they should try I say "No" 100% of the time. But Jetbrains/VSCode are a firm step down for my workflow.
My issue with Vim is remote servers and containers never have my (awesome) config.
It still pays off to know some basic Vim keybinds. You can often use them in other applications and every once in a while some machine only has vi. That said I grew up with DOS, do ctrl keybinds feel natural to me. Its just nigh annoying switching from macOS to Linux given the position of ctrl/fn/alt/super are different.
I can use VS Code in the browser: https://github.com/coder/code-server
> it starts up instantly,
I launch my editor once a day. Why do you need to keep killing and starting your editor?
> and it's completely free and open source,
OK, so is VS Code, or at least the OSS version, which has all the key features anyway.
> not driven by a corporation,
So this is your philosophy.
> and there's decades of documentation on how to use it.
Most of it out of date, probably.
> I guess it's the systems developer in me
Guess what? I'm a systems developer too! I also work on the kernel! But I use VS Code.
> that can't fathom someone that wants to use a tool to make a living without understanding it fully and being able to tweak it to their exact liking over the course of their entire career
VS Code is open source, so there's nothing stopping me from diving in if I want to. And it's also highly extensible.
Now that I've answered all the supposed benefits you list about (neo)vim, I have one question:
Can (neo)vim show text in two different font sizes? Or fonts? Like, what if I want my documentation popups to show up in a sans-serif font? No, don't tell me I have to open up the documentation in a browser or whatever. I want it in the popup.
Meanwhile my Vim go brrrrrr :D
Seriously, there's a huge benefit to not constantly switching and learning new environments (admittedly since Neovim / switching to Lua for scripting Vim there's been a lot new but all things the community wanted)
> it is intensely gratifying to build and improve the world around you.
For many of us, we expect we will be spending a significant chunk of our lives in the text editor.
Picking a dumb, inert, fixed, limited text editor is an apalling choice to some, versus picking something that has rich means of working the system (text objects, spellcrafting on the fly!!!) and infinite possibility (that flexible configuring, leader keys of possibilities). Picking a starting point where more is possible, where building & growing our world can be done- it's a path of lifelong struggle, but immense lifelong gratification, one where we will see our world florusihing and ourselves growing within in.
I personally resist a lot of the configuring & addition of plugins, am only an ok advanced vim user. But Im pretty ok at writing macros when i have a shitty chore, i make use of registers to handle reusable text- I appreciate having something much closer to a programming language than a input box at my back, and i keep slowly improving.
While vscode's ssh option is cool, it still requires that you have it installed on your local machine and while the web based version doesn't have that issue, it's missing other features (like ssh).
So for me the biggest motivator for switching to nvim has been the ability to connect to my machine and work on code from any device (ie even android) anywhere, only needing access to a terminal, and if I need to work on someone else's machine, having my environment there is as simple as cloning a git repo with my .vimrc
Fonts are better, colors are better, it is faster, less latency, running a terminal inside your editor works better, pop-ups and overlays work better/are more flexible/easier to read, mouse interactions work better, resizing works better, it is easier to run multiple windows, it is easy to run multiple different fonts with different font sizes, etc etc.
I also don't have to figure out solutions to conflicts between the keyboard shortcuts between the shell, the terminal, the terminal multiplexer (screen/tmux/tabbed terminal emulator), and the editor.
> I can use my editor over ssh and edit anywhere
I can just have my editor use ssh to edit files anywhere. Remote editing is a thing.
Anyways for proper system hygiene you shouldn't be shelling into anything except to troubleshoot problems or for checking things you don't have monitors in place for. This is why we have things like ansible or puppet.
In fact the whole insisting on having an editor in a terminal emulator thing is probably holding Nvim back as a whole. Which is why you don't see the obvious benefits.
Since the community wants to use terminal emulators so heavily then all the add-ons and features of the editor must support the lowest common dominator between desktop apps and terminal emulator, which is almost always going to be the terminal emulator.
Just remember that you are not avoiding a GUI by using a terminal emulator. It's still a GUI. Just a GUI designed for running command line applications in a Unix-style shell. And Neovim really isn't even a command line application.
Vscode or Jetbrains or any other integrated software is from the ground built up to have its tools work together 100% of the time. I like vim fine if I edit something without any plugins needed but otherwise I'll stick with an IDE. And if I want vim controls I'll just turn them on the IDE because conceptually for me it makes more sense to port keyboard controls to an IDE than to port the entire IDE to a terminal
Practical example, look at the instructions to set up an ide-like ocaml environment with neovim[1]. It requires basically to install half a dozen tools by hand and to fix the linter config before you've even started. In VsCode it's literally one click.
Any issues with the language server I doubt are client side, and every request/response is "async".
For a minimum setup it is:
1. Install the language server via opam:
opam pin add ocaml-lsp-server https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp.git
opam install ocaml-lsp-server
3. Add the following to your init.lua
require'lspconfig'.ocamllsp.setup{}
We're not trying to target vscode users, so if the above is too many steps that is ok, you just aren't our target audience.
I made your same argument for years to a buddy of mine that always used WebStorm (I'm a Python dev and he kept pushing me to try PyCharm). A coworker pushed me to try PyCharm since we're on Windows and I haven't really looked back. I even bought CLion.
If you can point me to an easy debugger to set up in neovim I'd probably be right back, but I can't. Couldn't figure out how to set up vimspector. And in PyCharm, at this point, I find it has better tooling than coc (I haven't wanted to spend the time setting up LSP/treesitter).
Furthermore, doing development in wsl isn't that great in my opinion and native windows neovim isn't either, even when using Windows Terminal. Its slow when handling a massive repository. FZF with ripgrep still works massively faster than telescope for my main work repository. I mostly dip into wsl when I want to do complex grep/sed/find operations and to make edits to my hledger timeclock sheet.
But one thing I've found to be a killer app for Pycharm Pro: vim keybindings in jupyter notebooks. Works way better than the plugins for Jupyter Lab.
IdeaVim is sometimes kind of disappointing, I wish JetBrains would just add a neovim plugin (I want to use vim sandwich instead of vim surround but alas). Still, it's good enough.
If you prefer Vimspector:
Thank you David, they're a fantastic overview of these plugins!
I work on kernels and various pieces of the boot process, so my needs when it comes to debugging aren't a typical case.
My .vimrc clocks in just below a humble 500 lines. VSCode gets me more with practically zero configuration out of the box; a few clicks to install relevant language extensions and that's it. It's more stable and more performant on large files (e.g. 2+kLOC Python modules). RemoteSSH and RemoteWSL plugins are 100% pure gold.
Most people just don't think it's worth it, when the existing tools are Good Enough for them.
But once you pass the initial obstacle, vim/emacs/derivatives are really nice to use, and there are plugins for literally anything out there.
Are people seriously training their muscle memory to the default vim keybinding that is so cryptic I don't know what to say.
Since the early days of learning vim, I've changed the "go to end of line" bound as "-" which is next to "0" for "go to start of line" which is way more logically placed than some "^" that even needs shift pressed.
If anyone thinks "because default works on any machine", you need to think how you're wasting your brain cycle on unnecessary complexity for no reason.
Nobody does that on purpose. It's just a side-effect of learning Vim.
After all that, yea I'm more productive but I think the large barrier of entry to CLI editors is what keeps people using IDEs and their Electron cousins.
Still, the fact is that you have to know what to install. It's not like the NeoVim manpage mentions any LSP clients. So it requires a lot of tinkering, reading and participating in the community to figure out how to do stuff. That's exactly opposite of 0-configuring.
If NeoVim could bundle an LSP client with it, and have a config key to enable it, that'd be dope.
https://paste.sr.ht/~mjlbach/1a1df5cd61627e87ea4c4355a0473bf...
All those features you've listed aren't anywhere on the homepage, how does one even do that? I'm interested in learning more, but to think one can do this in a weekend just isn't true.
While I'm sure I could figure out all these kinks, its just software, it's the time sink that makes me pause. I don't see the value here, but I also don't know what all it can do compared to my current workflow with VSCode.
Edit: Also to note - vscode supports editing files anywhere over ssh as well, so there isn't a huge advantage to neovim there.
Let me know how to highlight SQL in strings and make tables linked to remote database over SSH and autocomplete table names and column names as I type. And make sure that its grammar is checked against specific RDBMS's available syntax.
And I also want code formatting that's not entirely opinionated, so I can decide what gets wrapped and what gets indented and let it format an entire folder with a shortcut.
And if I'm setting the project to use PHP 8.0, make sure to highlight features I've mistakingly used from 8.1, so that I don't get runtime errors.
And if I'm editing files over SSH, make sure that if the remote file is changed, it warns me before I upload a local version, so I don't accidentally overwrite any remote changes and give me the option to merge.
And for sake of being right, in PHP if I have a function paremeter set as a string, highlight "is_string" check on the parameter as redundant, so my code doesn't look dumb.
I probably have others and even more that I'm not even aware of from its feature lists that can be useful over what vim/nvim can offer after taking some months configuring it to my liking.
I suppose you're comfortable missing out on those?
vim to me is a server config editor.
If I just need to edit a file, or view it, I'll often use vim. If I need to sit down and actually code? Intellij every time.
If vi had never existed, and you introduced it today, people would think it was some sort of april fools joke of an editor. It is the least intuitive and user friendly piece of software I've ever used. The only reason I continue to do so is because I've learned it's quirks and it's stockholm syndrome now.
It's really not difficult at all. I and others have probably a million things we would like to tinker with (yes, including tweaking a text editor), but we all have a limited time so we end up with priorities. It just happen that I didn't make a priority to tweak vim/neovim because I'm happy with my current code editing setup. For other kinds of software, I may not be happy at all, to the point of writing my own.
See: different people, different expectations. Your choice being right for you doesn't mean it's the right choice for everyone. Tolerance 101.
I say this as someone who uses both the editors I mention depending on context.
I've just never gotten around to learning vim in a more advanced way than edit, replace, copy paste, skip to line and search.
Any good suggestions on where to start? I looked at Spacevim but that seems to just throw everything at you.
It’s a pretty gentle introduction to vanilla vim over 4 weeks. After that point I’d recommend using nvim and all the plugins you want to make life easier, but learning The Vim Way is very powerful
IMO that approach makes the most sense too.
To get the muscle memory, try blocking the arrow keys in your config or even hiding the cursor (I'm serious, I once had this unintentionally and realized that because I was so used to Vim movements I didn't even need to see the cursor in normal mode).
The vim way is: stay in normal mode, learn to move efficiently with searching, jump to char, forward/backward words etc.
Don't use a prepackaged config. Refrain from plugins until you know for sure what you want.
Suppose you're using VSCode/Jetbrains with proper keyboard shortcuts (stuff like expanding selection, search/highlight all matches, ...) - basically never using the mouse. Is navigating / editing with NeoVim really that much faster?
So I get 98-100% of what an IDE gives me, I can use my editor over ssh and edit anywhere, I don't need a GUI to even be installed on the system where I have all of my cores and RAM for compiling the kernel, it starts up instantly, and it's completely free and open source, not driven by a corporation, and there's decades of documentation on how to use it.
Edit:
I really don't understand the comments of "I will literally not spend a single minute configuring my editor". I guess it's the systems developer in me that can't fathom someone that wants to use a tool to make a living without understanding it fully and being able to tweak it to their exact liking over the course of their entire career.
I personally consider my investment into Vim one of the best I ever made. If dumb college me can do it in a few weekends, you can do it. I recently setup Emacs and got it to the same level as my Vim usage in about two days of tinkering just for fun. Then again, I suppose some people are just here for the money and want to clock in and clock out as fast as possible. I really wish I could share with you the joy of tinkering, learning, and growing your knowledge about how these wonderful machines work.