this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Programming
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For my money: yes, you should use an IDE or something like one, but not because you're "missing out" - rather, because a plain text editor will limit your progress.
There are (still!) people around who think it's some sort of badge of honour to only use text editors, but in reality, this means they miss the syntax errors and typoes that we all make because we are human, and end up wasting hours looking for them when an IDE would let them see them.
You wouldn't turn up at a cookery school saying "I'm still a beginner, so I'm only going to use this pair of scissors" - specialised knives and utensils are part of the chef's toolkit, and becoming a better chef is just as much about learning to use them effectively as it is about memorising recipes. It's the same with programming.
I stick with vim for years out of that sort of badge of honor. Now I use vscode and nobody is taking it from me.
You can do almost anything in vim or emacs, but I can do it faster in vscode. It's a really fantastic tool and it's completely free.
VSCode + Vim extension is where it’s at
VSCode + Vim is one of the configurations I use right now. It's quite good. Not quite as nice in terms of being Vim as Vim + Tmux, which does get in my way, and it doesn't handle bookmarking very well, but definitely a very usable setup. I regularly use VSCode, Rider, and Visual Studio all with Vim extensions, and as much as I like Rider, the best Vim extension for it has issues. Visual Studio is probably my overall favorite for web backend, but VSCode is right there with it, and my preference for front-end.
I actually went back to (neo)vim because I found vscode was not quite keyboard-driven enough for my wants. But especially with neovim you can torture it into basically being a IDE with all the available plugins out there (e.g. in my setup I have highlighting, code completion, reporting of syntax errors and forth)
I stick with vim because every time I try to use vscode, I get so bogged down trying to set things up and figure out how to use it that I end up just being like, "eh, fuck it - I'll do this later."
Some younger admins and engineers look upon me with awe, but really I'm just secretly a really lazy bastard. I don't even pack plugins into vim anymore to make my life easier. Just plain old vanilla vim.
At the end of the day there’s some cost-benefit analysis for time spent setting up environment vs time saved by previously setup features. Autocomplete saves a good amount of time but even something like same-file-word suggestion can save a lot of time without any setup.
Yeah, for sure - I don't deny that at all. For me, it's a confluence of general burnout, laziness, and comfort with what I already know... and likely not a really urgent need to move to a proper IDE. The majority of my coding is small, one-off Python scripts where I can
:wqand run it and then open it back up to refine, fix bugs, add debugging prints, etc.Even for that there are some nice (vim and otherwise) features where clicking on an error automatically opens up the right file and sets the cursor at the location of the error. Or just seeing errors in a separate panel from the rest of the code.
Yeah, I used to configure vim with syntax highlighting and auto-suggestions and whatever else. I just like... don't anymore. I've been feeling less burned out over the last few months and it seems, at least, like its still lifting slowly. Maybe when I get the energy back, I'll take another crack at vscode.
Do you use the vim plugin for VSC to keep your speedy navigation? I miss things like "select up to the next quote" but I'm not enough of a vim user to make the switch myself.
for statically-typed languages, i agree that having powerful static analysis tools can help a lot, but why would you need an IDE just to catch "syntax errors and typos"? any editor with decent syntax highlighting would work for that, right?
😉
...anyway, there's more to it than syntax and typoes, naturally. They're just an example.
my point was that OP was opposing Geany, a text editor with syntax highlighting, to "real" IDEs with more features. clearly, it's those additional features that they're wondering the merit of. (personally, i don't think it's as limiting as you're claiming, but it's pretty subjective.)