Like Godwin's Law, every discussion of Vim on HN will inevitably tend towards complaining that it doesn't have features that it has shipped with 10-30 years.

It doesn't have code completion. You can install it as a feature, but vim itself doesn't have that feature. There needs to be a law for someone either flat out lying or not knowing what they're talking about because godwin's law doesn't apply here.

Additionally installing these features on vim is a nightmare for various reasons. It can be done, and I've done it, but the experience is not as good as the more clunkier GUI IDEs. I'm all for a TUI IDE if the experience was as automated or seamless as jetbrains or M$, but such a app doesn't exist yet.

^n

That’s your preference, which is fine. I started using extensions earlier this year, they were a little annoying to set up and don’t add much, I probably won’t do it again if I change machines.

Sometimes it's faster to fix the code where the bug is, rather than trying to recreate it in your cushy dev environment. Sometimes that means driving somewhere and working through at 9600 baud over an RS-232 cable. Do this a couple times and you'll find that vi is quite usable--you just have to want it to be.

>Sometimes it's faster to fix the code where the bug is, rather than trying to recreate it in your cushy dev environment

Sometimes, but with single powerful IDE solutions from companies like jetbrains, setting up a "cushy" environment is barely any work.

>Sometimes that means driving somewhere and working through at 9600 baud over an RS-232 cable. Do this a couple times and you'll find that vi is quite usable--you just have to want it to be.

Of course if your network connections completely fail you have to use the serial console to fix it. There's no going around that. But the majority of developers don't even need to do this or don't even know what you're talking about as they only interact with cloud services nowadays.

Additionally a "cushy" environment doesn't preclude you from using serial console or using vim to do edits everywhere. VI in this sense is barely useable, it's basically the baseline necessity. You need it when all else fails. But it's not good to have it as your daily driver.

> Sometimes, but with single powerful IDE solutions from companies like jetbrains, setting up a "cushy" environment is barely any work.

I promise, installing a Jetbrains product on a traffic controller (which is what I was thinking of re: the field trip) would be a tremendous amount of work.

> The majority of developers don't even need to do this or don't even know what you're talking about as they only interact with cloud services nowadays.

Yes, and they're one geomagnetic storm away from being entirely useless. It might not be for everybody, but there's value in being able to work with a lean toolset.

>I promise, installing a Jetbrains product on a traffic controller (which is what I was thinking of re: the field trip) would be a tremendous amount of work.

Jetbrains isn't installed on a traffic controller. It's installed on your local machine. Both VSCode and jetbrains have something called "remote development" which allow you to develop on a remote machine as if it was local.

>Yes, and they're one geomagnetic storm away from being entirely useless. It might not be for everybody, but there's value in being able to work with a lean toolset.

A geomagnetic storm will render everything useless, I don't see how a vim user will be more protected then a vscode user.

Not everything, just things hooked up to long enough wires to induce significant current. Pretty much just the power grid and the copper communication networks. For instance, I've got a raspberry pi hooked up to some solar panels handling some gardening stuff for me, it'll be just fine.

Editors are irrelevant to that conversation, but people who are accustomed to relying on stacks with many dependencies will definitely find that they struggle more without the internet than people who keep their dependencies minimal. And it's not a cherry picked example, there are all kinds of cases where minimal dependencies = resilience. It doesn't mean you have to go around using punch cards or something, it's really just the emotional attachment to complex tooling that I'm calling out as a hazard here. You end up cultivating skills that are easily invalidated.

>For instance, I've got a raspberry pi hooked up to some solar panels handling some gardening stuff for me, it'll be just fine.

You can remote ssh into the pi with Vscode or a jetbrains IDE with a laptop that likely won't be fried either under your description.

Python can run on the rasperry pi. Even high level interfaces will remain. Additionally GUI support exists on a Pi.

I'm aware of these features. I've used them in pycharm and intellij and vscode. I just find that they're a bit much to keep track of, and aren't usually worth it. I don't need a development focused OS in my OS, I have Linux for that.

It's been VSciode lately, and it's infuriating how it wants to handle everything for you. You can't just configure your linter, you have to do that and then figure out how to trick VSCode into invoking its linter in a way that respects the same configs otherwise CI won't agree with the dev experience--to name just one case of overreach.

And it's always guiding me to install this plugin or that widget and it's like:

> Great, now I'm relying on all of these undeclared dependencies and I don't know what kind of hell I'm creating for my PyCharm colleagues.

There's just a whole pile of problems that just don't come up if you let separate tools be separate tools.