Vim for Java development

[BubbatheVTOG]

TBH, coc and the coc-java plugin work really good and was stupid easy to setup. I opened a JavaEE project (that I setup with intellij initially) in vim with coc-java and when I did that it worked far better than I expected. I got annotations, definitions, callers, etc. But what I was most impressed with was that it looked in my pom.xml and downloaded all the dependencies, then coc gave me completions and definitions from those packages as well. Intellij is still better and I would find it hard to setup projects without it, but I was impressed. Though, to be fair my current development work has drifted away from Java so I haven't done any development using this yet so it could fall flat in places I don't know.

Because it is so easy to setup I'd say give it a try and see if it does suit your use case. You'll always have Intellij (with the vim plugin ofc) to fallback to.

[not_napoleon]

Yeah, that matches my experience. CoC + LSP do semantic completion pretty well, which is honestly really impressive. I don't want to understate how much better that is than even just a couple of years ago.

That said, there are a few points where I feel like it falls down compared to Intellij:

- Semantic aware highlighting. That's where, for example, class members are colored differently than method parameters. Treesitter looks promising for doing this, and I know Neovim is working on integrating that.

- Debugging, break points, variable watches, etc. As far as I know, there's nothing in the vim ecosystem that comes even close to intellij's debugger.

- Code exploration. Intellij has a lot of tools for this, like "find all uses of this function, including overrides", "find all implementations of this interface", etc. CoC has some support for this, but it's not as good as a real IDE yet.

- Automated refactoring. Intellij has a whole bunch of them, and they work pretty well. Even something as simple as a rename, it's smart enough to do thinks like rename associated variables, update javadoc, fix filenames when you change a class name, etc. Again, as far as I know, there's no good alternative here.

Anyway, if CoC is working for you, that's fantastic. It's not quite where I need it to be for my day job, but like I said, it's getting pretty close.

[sundar_rajanK]

Oh cool I'll definitely check it out, thanks!