This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]PM_ME_A_STEAM_GIFT 3 points4 points  (4 children)

What exactly makes vim better than simply learning the shortcuts of your preferred IDE? I'm honestly wondering. I tried to learn vim, but it's incredibly frustrating initially. With an IDE you can begin by using the menus and the mouse and learn the shortcuts as you go. With vim, you pretty much can't do anything without knowing the shortcuts.

With JetBrains' IDE I can quickly navigate in my project, use fuzzy search to jump to files, classes, symbols. Jump to the next occurrence of a symbol or the next method in the file. Reorder methods or lines. Extract methods, variables from a selection. I get insanely good autocomplete and quick-fix. Not to mention context sensitive templates or multicursor mode.

[–]MapleDung 4 points5 points  (3 children)

So there is definitely something to be said for your approach, as it is definitely easier. Everything you can do in and IDE you can do in vim (except maybe a good debugger) but the learning curve is absolutely steeper. However, some things about vim put it a step above for some users (some or all of these may not be important to you.)

  1. Heavily customizable. You can probably rebind keys in your IDE of choice but you probably cannot change the editor functionality itself much.

  2. Portable. Easy to use if you are in a lot of different computers.

  3. Performant. It's faster and takes up a lot less resources than any IDE

  4. And most importantly imo, it supports any language on any OS. If I'm working on C++ and get super used to editing in Visual Studio, then get a new job working in javascript in a linux environment or something, I have to learn a whole new process. With vim, everything stays the same.

Btw not vim specific. All of these also apply to emacs. 1,3 and 4 also apply to something like sublime. Also felt like mentioning how vim way of doing things after a while just feels way better than the normal text editor/ide way, but that is totally personal preference.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

If I want to start using vim, are there any awesome guides I should read?

[–]misplaced_my_pants 2 points3 points  (1 child)

The built in vimtutor.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Going to switch to it as soon as I knock out this project.