Your life as a developer depending on what you choose as an editor.
Let's compare and contrast your experience if you go down either of these paths. Feel free to branch the conversation on to other editors but I felt like this is the most relevant debate today.
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Top comments (80)
VSCode (VSC) and VIM are my two main editors.
I sit within VSC almost all day every day. Editing on multiple devices gets annoying when switching over (Windows/macOS), but there are some plugins to help with that effort (search extension
shan.code-settings-sync). VSC is a very powerful editor. Once you have keybinding setup, a few environment configs, and runners, you're good to go. The extension list is ever-expanding, and with that, you're more likely to find a few that really work well for you, or even make your own. Outside of the extensions, Intellisense is my saving grace. I often forget what functions are already implemented (or even the documentation and the argument variables) but that's when VSC is there holding my hand. The majority of work is in VSC because it's pretty on the eyes, integrated terminal for Windows (because no global hotkeys for iTerm2 like macOS) and the ability to work on various instances - even in the browser (see GitHub's new Codespaces?).VIM is however my go-to editor. If I need things quick done now I run
vimnotvscodein my terminal to kick things off. Any time I'm remoting into a machine, I runvim. Even when VIM is not there, I install it, copy my dotfiles from GitHub, and continue with my day. VIM is excellent, fast to use - especially when you start understanding the basics - and there is still so much more I don't know about it and have to learn; but there's help with that (duh StackOverflow too). I recommend learning some of the basics in navigation for developers of any kind. Again, back to remoting into other machines, having an editor already there for you taking just a single config file and you're on your way is an amazing tool to have some skills with as a developer. It opens lots of doors, and just like the comments made here (by @wayofthepie) it's something that can take time doing, but once you get the basics, "[it's like playing an instrument...my fingers just know what to do.]"Also, I know there are other terminal editors too, if one stands out then pick that one! Whatever makes you the most productive is the best for you and that's really all that matters. Stay safe 😄❤️
The terminal buffer in Vim8 and NeoVim is good, but one plugin that I came across recently makes it awesome. It's called neoterm. Here's a great video on neoterm (hosted by Drew Neil, author of the amazing "Vimcasts").
You can also check out this snippet from my Neovim config:
gist.github.com/pianocomposer321/f...
VSCode for development in local, vim for editing env files in production server.
They are both great. Used vscode mainly for about a year and really liked it. Didn't have to do much to get it working for most languages!
But I started getting some back, shoulder and wrist issues around that time. Not because of vscode, but because of how I sat and used my keyboard and mouse.
So I totally changed my whole workflow and setup. Moved to vim (well neovim) and switched to a tiling window manager so I could reduce mouse usage.
I spent a lot of time tweaking my vim setup to get what I wanted for the different languages and tooling I need to use. It's made me much more productive for sure. Not really faster overall - coding is mainly thinking 😄 - just more comfortable in translating those thoughts to code than I was with any other setup before.
It's become kind of like a musical instrument 🤔 I don't have to think much about performing a certain action, my fingers just know and do it.
Vim is amazingly powerful - but I can't be bothered to keep a map of key shortcuts in my brain.
VS Code - I might lose some time pointing and clicking, but it requires no extra mental arithmetic.
I can save that effort for creative problem solving. :)
I should add that I do have a level of envy for people who can do the former (including emacs users) - its impressive and I admire it. It's just one skill I've been unable to learn
Both VSCode and Vim are great editors with cult-like followings. Both have a great community built around them. For me it comes down to a few things that might not be of any importance to others. This is only my opinion and you're all welcome to take or leave it. First and foremost, I am not a Vim user nor will I ever be. I'm a strong advocate of pairing and Vim is painful to follow while pairing. I can't say the same for VSCode. If pairing is part of your team's workflow, Vim is a no go. In my experience VSCode just works and it doesn't require your pair to mind map to be efficient. I'll take the "slowdowns" that come with Electron apps in favor of all the built-in efficiencies for source control, debugging, and remote development. While the Vim community is large, it's ancient. Being a full stack engineer, I prefer my editor to stay as up to date as the technologies I'm using everyday. That's my two cents.
I always though of
ias “inside” andaas “around”.I switched to vim from TextMate over 10 years ago. I love modal editing. I also love modally controlling the whole editor (like opening files and showing/hiding different buffers). I have more trouble learning to hit several keys at once than learning to hit them in series. I do have a few key combos set up in vim that I keep forgetting so I should probably turn them into mappings.
That said I think VSCode is pretty awesome. What attracts me to it most is the powerful intellisense, since I haven’t figured out how to get more robust completion with vim plugins.
I’ve tried getting into VSCode, since I can at least edit text modally with it (although it feels slower), but there’s just too much to set up. Back in 2008 or 09, it took me two weeks of being fairly unproductive to get vim set up well for me. At the time there wasn’t much work to do because of the economy, but right now I have a lot of work to do (in spite of the economy).
Vscode wins cup🤾♂️🏆🥇
all community support extension and from web development perspective it is beast
It's camelCase, bro.
Yes I know but auto typing
VSCode is fantastic for large projects. I need the Intellisense training wheels at all times otherwise I would get nothing done.
Vim is nice for editing one line edits from the terminal or writing out a text file. Can't see myself ever using it for development
Out of the box, Vim isn't an environment that's terribly good for development. It does take some work to get it into a state where it's a genuinely good development environment because that tends to be language-specific.
I mostly do PHP, with some Javascript too, and I have, among other plugins, vim-ale for linting in multiple languages, and Deoplete for autocompletion. I also use PHPActor, which not only integrates with Deoplete to provide reasonably smart PHP completion, but also provides numerous refactoring tools of the sort that used to be the sole providence of IDE's.
In short, it can be done, but it's a very personal choice as to whether you think it's worth it for your own workflow. In my case, I have a degree of RSI from a previous non-coding role and it gets aggravated by using the mouse, so my workflow is very keyboard-heavy, and Vim fits that like a glove. I did migrate to Neovim nearly two years ago, but the experience is virtually identical.
In the Vim, the size of the project is not limited. He doesn't care if there are 20 files in the directory or 20,000, whether the file has 20 lines or 20 million.
Linux is my IDE.
In all seriousness, it is. Most IDEs have a way of navigating to web pages, editing text, running commands, attaching debuggers...
You know what Linux lets me do?
Navigate to web pages, edit text, run command, and attach debuggers. And I can configure it exactly how I want it.
But what's even better? Parts of my IDE are available everywhere in the world - even Vim, my usual text editor. But I can also edit text with emacs or nano or ed(browse) or... whatever.
It's definitely worth learning a tool like VSCode, but if you want to avoid vendor lock-in, Linux is the way to go.
Also, if you do use something like Visual Studio or VS Code, I highly recommend a macro that will launch a proper editor like vim. Yeah, you can edit code in VS, but I really only find it's useful for composing code. You can edit code much, much, faster in Vim when you're doing anything but the most trivial actions.
I use this on my work Mac:
That'll open VSCodium to the same line and column the cursor is on in Vim. I do that to make use of the former's debugger, which I find a lot easier to use than Vdebug.
I don't use VSCode on my personal machine, but if I did, I'd change
opentognome-open.Each Vim developer had a custom layout and file tree that made it hard to follow during pairing. Again this is just my experience, but I didn't find much consistency between Vim environments either. There's also the fact that I had no indicator of what was going on when the host would start tapping away at key bindings. I think we've all been there when a Vim developer mistypes a command several times just so they can do it the "Vim way". During these times I would tune out or get frustrated with the inefficiency. I've also had several Vim devs tell me that X plugin is not working so they have to do things a little weird, then run linting/formatting outside as a post process to their normal workflow. Not show stoppers by any means, but IMO unnecessary friction points.
i need to figure out how to set up tag bar. i love vim but i don’t have it set up well to be a great IDE.
I think the key with any editor/tool is to learn it well to be more efficient. VSCode is easy to use so it doesn't necessarily force you to learn the hotkeys and get good with it. Vim has a learning curve in order to use it, so it is very much learning by doing and forcing you to get better with it. Customizing an editor like Vim may not be worth the investment in time saved typing, but it may be preferred or a fun hobby for some.
When I code, I am usually not furiously typing away, I'm thinking more about what I want to do and then entering it. I don't believe the editor or using the mouse is slowing me down, I would still want to take my time. Learning the default hotkeys and features is enough for me, so I prefer VSCode.
Not specifically VSCode/Vim, but I'm also a big mouse user (probably due to my PC gaming background), but there is more and more "mouse shaming" that I see going on in the developer community. It has equal priority to the keyboard for me. Sometimes there just isn't a good keyboard shortcut to get to something on the screen which is frustrating and inefficient for me. Tabbing through a webpage is kind of like iterating through all items in an array (O(n)), but clicking on the exact link is like accessing a specific array index (O(1)). At least that is how I think of it. 🤷♂️
For webpages, vimium is the browser extension. Imitates the whole vim experience.
I started using i3wm on Arch. Then, felt the need for something similar keyboard-driven in browser. That's when I came across Vimium.
Funnily though, I learnt vim/neovim after few months using Vimium.
Both are really good. I have ventured across all three lands including emacs, vim and vscode. The amount of time we can kill optimizing the configuration with vim and emacs is just 🤯 (both in a good and bad sense at the same time). Now while I get older, I realized that I don't have the time to tweak stuff until wee hours in the night. Having to manage time between work, family and my self. So these days , what ever gets me productive soon is my tool of choice. I might use vim to edit files and have a basic configuration that work out of the box. VSCode for majority of the other work purely because I work across PHP, Typescript, JavaScript, Ruby, Go and with Terraform. It just saves the time I have to configure the editor.
So this is just my circumstances and how I opt to use the little time I have available. It was a completely different ball game a decade ago for me.
I didn’t find VSCode to be that great without a similar amouint of configuration.
Possible. But most of the extensions work pretty fine out of the box.
With modern LSP plugins + fuzzy finders, I feel that I get the best combination with NeoVim, and I can edit code in Docker containers + Servers with IDE-like functionality. My dotfiles bootstrap NeoVim and install everything I need, so taking over a container to debug it is relatively painless :D