I’ve tried vim on and off during college but never really had the time to fully get working with it. As it turns out the stress of two degrees is not conducive to “fun activities”. Now that I have a real job ™️, I’ve decided to finally try and use it this week full stop and I genuinely feel like a programming chad. There’s still a lot I’ll need to learn and probably overtime I’ll discover some inefficiency in how I’m using it now but it really does just feel good. I understand the hype now.
You probably already know this, but most IDEs have a setting to enable Vim keybinds or you can easily install an extension to add them.
I really like Neovim but my job often requires some stuff that it doesn’t easily do. So, VSCode is what I use a lot of the time… with the Vim extension.
Just something to consider if your stack isn’t super well supported in Vim/Neovim or you need tools it doesn’t have for your work.
I tried vim keybinds in an IDE, and it sucked.
It wasn’t even that advanced usage, but it just didn’t work.
Instead I know run language servers in neovim.
I use vim keybindings in both IntelliJ and VSCode with no problems.
Keybindings are OK, but anything beyond movement was way less ok.
Don’t remember if macros or buffers were implemented correctly.
Buffers do work in IntelliJ. Not sure about macros since I don’t use them. Haven’t checked VSCode. I found the IntelliJ plugin was better though.
I agree with you. I figure you probably know this, but VS Code can act as a frontend for Neovim, providing one-to-one Neovim keybindings.
Some parts I never got working, but movement was honestly flawless. But I use a lot of snippets with ultisnips, and I didn’t like the idea of translating all of that to hypersnips (or whatever the VS Code equivalent was called), so I stuck with Neovim.
Movement is like 20% of why vim is amazing.
Without macros I’m already out, registers are also mandatory, marks are very nice to have, etc.
I have trouble even remembering what are some of the features called, it’s just musle memory now.
What part didn’t work? I use that all the time in IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code.
Most of vim is not emulated. It’s very surface-level and limited. The closest is evil mode for emacs, which is decent, but still lacks a fair bit. The emulators in Intellij and VsCode are paltry in comparison to what vim can do.
Most of them, unfortunatelly.
Only the basic movement is not enough.