Should i use vim or gvim

I have only just started using it for linting and I haven't delved into the other features but I think it has massive promise to offer a lot of what is expected from an IDE.

The only places I differ slightly from David Terei's excellent answer :. You should be careful in installing IDE plugins they can very easily impact Vim's performance. It's worth noting how flexible Vim allows you to be with setting up your code base.

Where as many IDEs only work on the project level, you can create a parent folder across many Git repos, FZF and Ripgrep are so powerful that they'll consume huge code bases and hardly slow down when searching across them. With Ctags you can build up the index across repo boundaries. This is actually fills a couple of uncommon points in Sourcegraph's checklist for intelligent editors I think Vim is able to fulfil all points that most current IDEs do beyond these :.

Using Vim's buffers allows you to have s of buffers open with no cluttering of the UI or reduction in performance. Typing :b some-buffer-text and then Tab allows you to autocomplete buffer names easily.

I also use the following line taken from another answer which allows listing all buffers and printing the buffer command to allow you to quickly switch to another via its number:.

Tim Pope has a novel recent database dadbod plugin, that gives you similar powers that you have in Microsoft's Database Management Studio. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

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EDIT: For those of you who think you speak for the masses in saying that Vim should not be used as an IDE, please consider that IDE features are the number one feature request on the official feature request list on vim. Improve this question. Nippysaurus Nippysaurus It boggles my mind that vim is lacking some very basic functions, like correctly indenting my wrapped lines.

Until they fix that, I doubt they will be giving you any IDEs. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. For example, your. And a PluginUpdate command will install them or update them. Generally slower, but doesn't require compilation Tag Bar - Code navigation by functions Bookmarking - Bookmarks for vim my own plugin : Text Completion: delimitMate - Automatic closing of parentheses, braces.. Formatting: tabular - Align text easily vim-surround - Quickly surround some text i.

Just awesome: ALE - Live syntax checking for many languages, supports Vim 8's new features such as asynchronous jobs to ensure it doesn't freeze up Vim while running. The two projects below include many of the plugins I mention above: Janus spf13 I recommend you don't use them though.

Vim Plugin Guides VimAwesome can be a good place to browse for Vim plugins and find useful and popular ones. Vim Patches In addition to those scripts you may want to look at some of the following patches for Vim. You can view all the patches here , the ones that make vim more of an IDE are: Code Check - On-the-fly code checking note : Syntastic is a better choice these days. Improve this answer. David Terei David Terei 1, 15 15 silver badges 17 17 bronze badges.

ViVim looks very interesting : — Nippysaurus. You recommend Syntastic over Code Check, but you also recommended Ale, which is preferable over Syntastic and I don't think you want to mix the two. Ale is both async and is also implements the Language Server Protocol which is becoming more important.

These days, Ale may be yet a better choice over Syntastic. Jens There is also a VS plugin that comes with GVIM, but it launches the editor in its own windows and doesn't actually integrate with the VS editor like viemu does.

Note MonoDevelop includes a quite full fledged Vi mode. And it is starting to run on Windows. Jeremy Cantrell Jeremy Cantrell Honestly, the people I see using IDEs are mostly working on legacy systems, and people using vim or other text editors are working on vanguard technologies.

To a large extent, IDEs are training wheels. They lessen the cognitive load, facilitate adoption of unfamiliar technologies. But, like training wheels, they also limit you. I find some of the history behind the Emacs vs Vim debate rather interesting, but I was not even born in the 80s.

I found vi on my own during high school, I graduated in , and after climbing the rather steep learning curve, I now use it for almost everything.

Most of the so-called modern tools do a lot for their users. And in my experience, I have seen many programmers that do not understand what their editor is actually doing. A good example would be managing git repositories. Vim and Emacs both are extremely customizable, and any feature that one desires can most likely be found in a plugin.

Also, the latest release of Vim is only from last year. Rather, I think the big divide is more of a philosophical approach; do you want it to do everything for you?

Or do you want something that stays out of your way unless you tell it otherwise. I think the worst IDEs are the domain-specific ones because then you end up with like six different IDEs because they are very opinionated on what languages or tools they work with, specifically all the terrible embedded ones like uVision from Keil. Also no mention of ultra edit.

That was my go-to for a while in the early 90s on windows systems. Notepad is trash. For one thing, vim is always there well vi is , but emacs very rarely is. Vim is usable by anyone familiar with the key bindings whereas emacs without your personal customizations can be a nightmare.

For another thing, vim vs emacs is a meme that does not really reflect reality. One of the most popular plugins for emacs is evil-mode which brings in the vim key bindings. I came to both after being an avid visual studio, crimson, jedit, sublime text which I lectured on , intellij, and atom user. In fact most people I know making the switch are young developers.

So why did I move to emacs over the darling of the hour vscode? Ever notice how vscode has no golden ratio mode? No ability to position the terminal the same way as other windows? To split and rotate windows at will? I use it because for the most part, it makes me far more effective than the alternatives.

There is much to be annoyed with in emacs and vim, but the newer IDEs need to mine then a heck of a lot more for ideas before I jump so again.

I can easily switch to Kanji or ancient greek and create Anki cards to help me with both. I can extend the editor and the UI, override anything to create a domain-specific editor for stuff no one is ever going to produce a commercial product to support. Emacs is the Unix Philosophy taken to the ultimate extreme — it does one thing and does it well. Did I miss something? That is what Vim gave me, a way of thinking. Honestly what I want is the Vim-way of editing mixed with the modern way of organizing my editor.

For now Visual Studio Code with vim mode is a quite pleasurable experience in my opinion. I have a unique take as someone that is just starting out in their coding journey. I dont really care what others find easier. Its what I find easier and more comfortable. Not sure criticizing people for wanting to stick with whats fastest and easiest for them to use makes any sense.

The article is low key trying to start something, but people getting angry over it clearly enjoy a fight, too. I have been programming for 25 years. Never once did I think that fingers were the bottle neck. It was always the stuff between the ears. If typing is taking most of your development time, you are probably not doing it right. Modern editors and IDEs are great. The older editors are too archaic and have key bindings and design constraints based on limitations of the eras when they were developed.

The only proper use for them is in terminals where better alternatives are still not available. They are good to have around, just in case, but rarely the optimal choices. They are fallbacks. Use rmate with a modern editor. VNC in unless you are constrained by the network. Use productive tools, not tools that just have you doing busy typing to make you feel more productive. People often confuse furious typing with productivity. Why do programmers use them instead of IDEs? Because they are IDEs.

Game over. Back to IDEs. Knowling that I can break out basic vim whenever needed, like on a server. Author makes a lot of baseless claims. Developer in 30s, work with many developers in 20s. Almost all of us use vim because it is so much faster once you know how to use it.

All of us have used IDEs and rejected them. Vim offers power, speed, and fine grained control. It can be customized and extended to anything modern IDEs do faster with lower resource usage. Not as clumsy or arbitrary as an IDE, it is an elegant tool for a more civilized developer.

Vim is a safe haven for every developer who has ever finished typing a line of text and stared despondently at the screen while the IDE struggled to display it a bloody character at a time. Vim is a swiss-army-knife that is not miserable to use over SSH. Vim and emacs are tools for developers who would prefer a more efficient tool that requires effort to learn how to use over a less efficient tool with a lower skill threshold.

My development environment is the terminal emulator. It already has the maximum degree of git integration possible. It can literally do anything git can do, and if you know how to use it effectively, it can do so faster than the IDE. Try buiding a phone app with vim. With vim I can have a consistent editing environment between all of those, including my own computer.

However, to just say that vim, emacs, nano, etc are outdated points to a somewhat narrow perspective on the issue. For new programmers, vim and the like can certainly be a bit awkward to start with when compared to Atom and other IDEs.

The authors are talking about emacs and vim like they stopped being developed in the 70s. I have yet to not find support for a language or an environment while working with vim. Emacs is the epitome of customizable. Not to mention the sheer amount of hotkeys, macros, and extensions that you accrue over time using a single editor. We get it… you like shiny things, just keep using it.

Visual Studio streamlines just about every aspect of developing useful software, and vim streamlines every facet of actually inputting and editing text.

I want vim to help me navigate text and type, which it helps me do really, really well. Who cares? You like VI, use VI. You like Emacs, use Emacs. Pick your poison. I find a multi-pane terminal configuration with Vim the most powerful development environment for my current needs.

I occasionally fire up VS Code to work on Jupyter notebooks. Trying to open a data file of a few tens of megabytes on these modern magic editors, you will find that the program will just freeze. I also once tried Atom, which was unbearably slow to just start up. This is really weird. Have you tried Emacs lately? I has support for LSP, code completion, git, multiple-cursors, project management, linting, real-time LaTeX preview, etc.

You can edit it as regular text, search in it, etc. When you save it, your edits are propagated to the underlying files. I did a grep for the name of the function, placed one cursor on each line of the result, used a keybinding to flip the arguments on each line, saved, and I was done.

The only difference with Atom or VSCode is that the whole IDE is built around text, which means that you can interact with all of it with normal text commands. Vim is great. Everyone wants great editors and everyone wants a thriving editor scene. Making it even better, if you want to do something programmatic with that web browsing, feed reading, email, whatever it is: typically having it implemented in Emacs makes it possible to further script as needed.

To get extensions in most other editors requires either building a plugin or calling out to an external process. For instance, if for some reason you wanted to write a server for testing your web code in real time, you would write it in some other language like Node and then have your typical IDE call Node… but in Emacs you can literally just pull down the web server package and spin up your server in the editor. Though you just about could.

Simplest possible example, think adding tags to your headings and being able to search by tags. Small feature, more handy than it sounds. You can actually add arbitrary programmatically accessible data, and timestamps support various scheduling tools. Some people learn Emacs just for Org Mode, and while I will say it took me a while to learn it, I can also say I recommend as strongly as possible giving it a try.

Back in the day I was writing code for mainframes, workstations, PCs, and even the odd embedded microprocessor system. Uhm, screen latency?

Even Vim users break out an IDE from time to time. But all the featuritis does indeed come with an usability price. Not everyone can put up with it all day long, whether they realize it or not. I have used simple editors like geany, gedit even notepad sometimes. I have used heavyweight IDEs like eclipse, netbeans, visual studio, aptana studio, intellij etc.

The i found visual studio code, and i thought, wow, its great, i have finally found something simple but feature rich or at least has the features i need. I have used vscode for nearly 2 years. I loved it. Then came in Microsoft, started to mess around things.

In a simple one python script editing session, i found my computer hanging over and over again. After investigating, i found the reason was the ms python language server was taking nearly 6GB of ram. It was just little script, a Qt application. Very tiny script to be honest. But the ms language server was eating up every bit of ram it found. May be it was some bug may be something else was wrong with it. I was getting frustrated about it.

It wasnt just the ram, vsocde and its extensions were killing my processor too. So i started looking for something else. I know about vim and emacs from way back, but never used them in anything other than command line editing. I started learning emacs, from tutorial to intro to elisp. Soon i realized, emacs is not an editor! Its a freaking editor framework! So i stayed with default emacs and built up from that. Now i am using a lot of packages, customized to meet my needs.

I could even use different language server for different buffer even for the same language. I had to use eglot for a python script as lsp was too slow or incomplete with any supported server for that script.

It was a simple gtk app. Anyway, the daemon mode is too cool. And the org mode! Damn, its just awesome. I am still discovering stuffs about emacs, and the more i am learning the more i am impressed by the extensibility of it. I have uninstalled vscode, wont touch it again. The idea of telemetry within an editor and its extensions, bothers me.

I have used vim, its awesome too. But i think i am gonna be stuck with emacs and i will keep loving it. First a few points about your article itself. Also a few points you conveniently, or because for lack of knowledge? And spent as much time in it as in an IDE? Man is it fast. For everything else? For goods sake be glad that there is choice. Vim invented properly composable commands that are only now starting to get properly appreciated. Muscle memory works both for you and against you — some people have no idea how irritating it is when programs like Gimp will not open a file when you press ALT F O but fail to take your finger off the ALT key before pressing the O.

I agree. The new generation of programmers really need to pull up their socks and actually learn Emacs or Vim. I use vim a lot, after you get over the steep almost vertical! But the reason I learned vi was because I had to. Stuck in a cold data centre with a sev 1 at 2 a. You could be pretty sure that everything but vi was stripped from the production servers and worse ksh was in vi mode. Once you know how to cook, use your favorite knives, but stop spitting on the other ones.

Waste of time. You forgot one thing — each developer has different needs. Many IDEs, like Visual Studio or the ones from Borland or Jetbrains, tried to be an all-in-one development environment, not only an editor.

For a beginner, the ability to discover and use all that, in an intuitive way, was the main advantage. What a ridiculous article. Thanks to its communities both vim and emacs are easily as powerful as modern IDEs plus having the potential benefit of being heavily customizable. I tried a bunch of IDEs at different companies already but there is always something that I find inefficient or even annoying about them which makes me come back to vim.

But why? The other IDEs are all the same and are not better at all. There is a reason vim is still here and every other old editor is gone yeah emacs has not a lot of users left. This article does not explain at all why vim is still around. It does argument for a statement it denies itself. This is highly subjective and unscientific. VIm is still a thing because it is another better approach to text editing.

No new IDE has it. Even the ones with vim keybindings only emulate the approach and will never be as good and mighty in it. The mistake you do is seeing a text editor in vim. It of course is a text editor, but it should not be seen as one. It should be seen as a text editing language. You just tell vim what you want to do with the text: c hange w ord, d elete w ord, y ank p aragraph.

And so on. It is easier to remember and easier to think of. It does not break your flow of thoughts. Plugins do work the same. I use IDE and vim. The Jetbrains products PyCharm, et. I use vim in a terminal for quick and dirty edits, or working through an ssh session. I use PyCharm for more complex tasks or debugging. I still use Emacs for some things and vim for others. Glad I know them. I usually use Visual Studio Code for PowerShell development and Visual Studio for C for various reasons including supporting existing code bases that were developed with those tools.

There are advantages and disadvantages to everything and there are no exceptions. If you love Lisp as a friend of mine does, you may absolutely love Emacs, for instance. Also in my development group, most programmers are barely proficient to start. It helps us generate more uniform coding.

He is Emacs Window Manager. The power is unlimited, trust me. Which one is still useful? The reason experts continue using the tools they trained on is because they are experts. And, so, she goes back to the violin. Text editing is insanely efficient in vim once you have the right plugins in place. For git integration, vim-fugitive is excellent so much so that when I do have to use IDEs I still switch to vim for staging hunks of code and resolving merge conflicts.

By doing so, instead of dropping my pinky to the CTRL key constantly not a comfortable key to hit , I can stay in the home row all day without tiring myself out. Food for thought…. I use Vim for the last 5 years, with some plugins, and I love Vim.

I have linters, git integration, colors preview in CSS. I have experience with IntelliJ products, Atom, VSCode, but I love that Vim is easy on system resources also saves the battery , can be found everywhere, effective. And Vim is free, open source. I usually see a demo with some feature that looks like the killer one that will make this IDE my new favorite too. I have always come back to vim for several reasons and I would imagine, emacs users will say the same.

It may work a bit different but in the end gets the same result. Anyone that has been developing software for more than a few years most likely has several languages under their belt. Even those with a good plugin architecture often work very different with each language. And adding each plugin usually adds a lot of overhead. To master one tool instead of spending massive amounts of time always searching for the perfect IDE.

And use that extra time to read articles on software development, design patterns, algorithms etc. Of course, IDEs have some support for keyboard shortcuts, but its as good as mouse support in Emacs.

Its terrible. Its impossible to not use mouse in IDE and its impossible to not use keyboard shortcuts in emacs. Second major Emacs advantage is its unparalleled extensibility and explorability.

All emacsers use heavily customized Emacs to their needs because the price to do so is small. Both do the same thing, but latter a lot more effective. All of the GUI features are just noise and inefficiency from my perspective. Most, if not all, of the revered features and plugins and features in VS Code and the like can be accomplished as competently, and probably more efficiently, with a little bit of Vim customisation.

Admittedly, the initial learning curve presents some challenges until you can fly, but once you get over that hump you really can fly. And for me, the grammar of Vim continually provides inspiration. I think it has the best UI of any application I have ever used — seriously.

I find it interesting how SpaceVim has made this attempt to get the best of both worlds. I only wish I could integrate that one idea from SpaceVim without also taking in all the rest of their config. This might be forgivable if it stopped there, but to go further and say:.

You seem to have missed the part where Emacs can be integrated with absolutely anything. This quote is self-incriminating in a sense as it reveals the attitude that code is nothing but keystrokes, sold by the pound-per-minute and that refactoring is some indulgent sin. Not just a clutch of text files that are fulfilling their purpose out of sheer coincidence, forever accruing complexity as changes are incrementally piled on in haste. I think of it as a risk to business continuity for the vast majority of companies out there.

All to compensate for the absence of editor code awareness which — to me — is a metaphor for analysis and reflection. Inevitably, there are communication pains and gnawing deficiencies in onboarding that are either never organically encountered lucky! I make use of Visual Studio Code as a notepad replacement or for small projects where the deliverable is more declarative than procedural terraform, docker compose.

As noble as they are, text editor puritans are immediately at a disadvantage, even in the simplest of codebases. Use what you want in the end and show me that it can work in the merge reviews. More importantly though, we might even benefit from having to hear less about vim…. This resonates with me, although it comes from the other side. It is a shame when, in one way or another, the project structure is affected by the personal choices of development tools.

Developer should choose whatever tool they want, and configure the tool to do the job, rather than configure the job to suit the tool. Not only do I use vim, but I use pretty plain vim.

Which kind of proves my point. Again, proving my point. But my experience is that people waste too much time on them. You and your friends have never tried Docker? To grasp the nature of that you need to read between lines in the mind of their creators, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernigan, and others. The traditional tools available there editors included are fast, lean, stable, and have decades of work done to refine and perfect them, and they can easily be composed together to do anything you would want out of an IDE and more.

Learning new tools take time. Well, why not just an IDE then? By starting with Vim and adding plugins as I go along, I can try out alternatives and make my own choice. The result feels more like home, and reflects my manner of thinking. From time to time I change plugins, or throw some away.

My OS already has a terminal, file manager, and search tool; yet the IDE crams in their own versions of these. The terminal, filesystem tree, and console are all cramped. When I use a separate applications the OS is aware of them, so I can manage them using my window manager, task manager, and fuzzy-finder thing. Of all my reasons for avoiding an IDE, this is the most important one. I use many of the keyboard shortcuts from bare Vim, and have a few leader-key mappings for some commands I use a lot.

A I used to fire up NetBeans just for step debugging. Nowadays I use the Vim VDebug plugin. B Project-aware code navigation, and auto-suggestion.

Nothing in the article backs this statement. Personally, I think vim keyboard bindings are great. Interesting article. I come from an Emacs background but have recently switched to VS Code. I love Emacs and have done for two decades — the key bindings and customisability has meant I invested deeply in it.

I will continue to use Emacs for text files. My blade Swiss Army Knife is in my toolbox — somewhere. I committed myself to mastering Vim during lockdown.

Can anyone master Vim fully? Refactoring in vanilla Vim is way harder, if you gotta get plugins for all the languages of choice, then better go for a full featured IDE. That being said, I think knowing how to use Vim at a basic level is an essential skill, due to this omnipresence of the editor in Unix systems.

Being able to code comfortable for a few minutes with Vim lets me do some quick hacks in servers without having to scp the content… develop in my full IDE and upload back.

Vim is very powerful indeed. And I highly appreciate its features when I require them. I have always been shocked at how little people who edit code for a living know about their editor — regardless which editor they choose.

I doubt that this changes much with an IDE. I think the difference is if a team is required to use an IDE then someone else has made this all work for them and only through the IDE can they get necessary resources. That said, I put quite a bit of effort into getting Eclipse working at a company, and since I could not make it mandatory, no one started to use it.

Including me. It was too much trouble to keep it working just for myself, so I stuck with emacs. Do IDEs really make most coders more productive? I am not so sure.

The folks that only know how to copy paste, search, and save are not commenting or even reading this thread, so we are really only preaching at the choir here. When I began to study programming, using vim for that as well came naturally, but I have been open to alternatives. I clicked this article expecting to learn some of what makes IDEs so useful, or maybe some advice for when to use an IDE over a text editor.

Instead I learned nothing. This article reads more like notes the authors took about the available options for code editing. Oh, and occasionally whatever that depraved stuff inside Excel is. Others have their entire build infrastructure locally. Installing random IDEs was not possible.

Or I could open 3 ssh windows, one for vim, and the others for running the code and watching logs. Vim is for people who like Unix, and who think in Unix ways.

And just think of spacemacs, or neovim. So what remains of any of the quoted arguments then? Is maybe the IDE the lazy, dated way to code at the end? Please scrap this, and try again when you actually looked at how advanced users use vim and emacs, and write a properly researched article and not just a hit piece.

You'll learn much more if you take the time to configure vim yourself and install plugins in a staggered process to learn each one well. In addition to those scripts you may want to look at some of the following patches for Vim.

I haven't used them so not sure of the quality but most of them look quite promising. You can view all the patches here, the ones that make vim more of an IDE are:. With those scripts and patches installed, you should have something in Vim pretty close in features to Visual Studio or Eclipse. You can also go the other way around and use a plugin called viemu. This one gives you vi-mode within the VS IDE, which makes it easier for colleagues to co-drive on your system.

I'm not trying to be inflammatory with this response, but I want to save you some headache. This is the same answer I give to all the people that ask similar questions in vim. Vim is not an IDE. It's an editor. It was never intended to be an IDE, and any attempts to make it conform to this will only cause you problems. There are some plugins that try to provide an IDE-like feel to Vim, but these are horrible. I do, on the other hand, recommend some plugins that will help you get some extended functionality from Vim.

These might suit your needs.