Alternatively you can use and support a true community-driven editing environment dedicated to preserving your freedom, like vim/neovim or emacs.
That is incorrect. Both are pretty barebones from the start and have a big pool of extensions to get the functionality that you need. It might be more involved on the vim/nvim side, but that is more of an accessibility VS personalization thing.
There are even sort of distributions for nvim that bring you all the common functionalities already configured.
lapce is a vscode replacement that has all the sugar that people love and it’s blazingly fast. It’s still in alpha but I’m very hopeful for it’s future.
I have looked at lapce and I am hopeful it will mature enough to replace vscode. I haven’t had the time to see if it works enough to replace vscode for my daily work, but I am planning on trying it again soon.
Fleet seems promising but not sure how I feel about another JetBrains editor.
Glad you liked it :) It still has issues but the development is happening at breakneck pace. I’m planning on daily driving it once it goes beta.
I also have conflicting feelings about jetbrains IDEs. Does fleet have a community edition? I use pycharm sometimes but also hate it sometimes.
You can also use Debian 1.1 but the makes zero fun as well.
Why make your own life hard for no reason. VIM is really really outdated when it comes to ease of use.
There is not a single thing where vim is better in any way. The argument that it is faster is the biggest lie ever.
Example: I write a few hundred lines of python code and execute it but sadly made formal mistakes. VIM does not help a bit. It might take hours of bugfixing with help of a command line.
Python addon and some others would have instantly found those mistakes saving myself a lot of headache.
That’s the same comparison as the senior developer and the normal dev. The dev might type twice as fast but making 5 times the mistakes he still needs a lot more time than the slow index finger typing senior.
The argument that it is faster is the biggest lie ever
Vscode is written in JavaScript and running in a web browser. Vim is written in C and runs at a console. Of course Vim is faster. Vscode is a hobbled cripple by comparison.
The rest of your comment suggests you are ignorant of vim with plugins and command line tools. I’ve tried vscode and while it looks nice, I am far faster when developing with vim and a couple of open terminals.
IDEs like VSCose are only powerful because they integrate coding tools like LSPs and completion enginea. Those tools are also available on neo/vim or Emacs, so you can be as proficient as you were with VSCode. Hell, even GitHub’s Copilot is available on vim!
And frankly, having started coding on Atom before switching to neovim, I find a keyboard centric, mode-based coding much more efficient than a usual mouse-centric workflow.
It really boils down to personal preference, but I’m eager to find some objective arguments proving that “vim is outdated when it comes to ease of use”, because that’s not what I experienced.
What features are available in vim that aren’t in vscode? Genuine question, trying to decide if I should make the switch
This is incorrect. Vim and neovim can reach the same level of functionality as VS Code through plugins and extensive configuration. An experienced vim user with plugins is as fast as an experienced VS Code user with plugins.
Getting vim experience and customizing it has a much steeper initial investment. That’s where the disconnect is.
There is an argument to be made that completely mouseless development is faster. This also requires a steep initial investment to pan out.
But that’s something new to learn and configure. I just want to code why should I spend my time learning another text editor when vscodium is fine
Who doesn’t want to go through learning of text editor and pain of configuring instead of actually coding?
Same reason why a carpenter should learn to properly use hand tools, or a teacher should keep up on literature. In other words, master your tools. It doesn’t matter which tool you use, provided you can use it to its full potential.
I occasionally use VSCode, but I mostly use ViM because that’s my tool of choice.
For another reason, if your ever in the situation where you need to work on something on a remote server or an unfamiliar machine, knowing ViM means you can at least be somewhat productive when you don’t have your normal tools available.
I know vim. I’m using vscodium with a vim plugin. I was coding in pure vim for half a year because my Laptop with 4 gigs of RAM couldn’t handle vscode. I just don’t want to configure vim so it does all the stuff VScodium does for me
Careful. You’re in a linux-heavy audience. They’re the kinda people who would spend a few weeks setting up systems to use it for a few minutes.
I’m a full-time Vim and Linux user when writing code. I agree with the statement that “simply switching” editors is very naive. I’m my personal opinion, you should decide on an editor that makes sense to you and learn to be very good at it. If VS Code is that answer, then great. Not everything points to Vim or Emacs.
I’m still using sublime to this day. It keeps getting worse and falling behind VSCode with every new feature that never comes gets to it, but I have so many pet peeves with VSCode that everytime I try it I soon give up. I wish there were more options these days, but as the expected feature sets get more complex the number of options keep going down.
Vim and EMACS require tons of plugins and a brain transplant to feel confortable using them.
And the new personality tends to be somewhat evangelical about the editors 😄
I would love to use emacs, unfortunately coding in TypeScript is much more pleasant to me than coding in elisp or lua.
Not to say Typescript is a good experience either, I always feel like fighting the language than actually coding. Just saying they are better than elisp or lua.
Also I find vscode has better mouse interaction, but maybe emacs got better with time.
Are you talking about configuring the editor? Ideally, that’s not a common task, so it really shouldn’t matter much if it uses TypeScript, elisp, vimscript, or lua.
And if you’re primarily using the mouse, you’re missing most of the point of editors, especially emacs and ViM. The real power of those editors comes from keyboard shortcuts and combos, not from plugins and menus.
Yes, ideally a editor would work without any configuration, but unfortunately I haven’t met any emacs user with sub 200 line dot files.
I personally cannot remember more than 20 hotkeys to save my life.
Also I find the most time-consuming part of my work is actually thinking, not clicking around with a mouse. so I don’t really need to spend month to remember all the hotkey just to save 2 seconds clicking. In fact, slow down and click couple buttons to commit gives me a bit to rest and enjoy the moment when I have finished a task…