this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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I'm trying out Obsidian for taking notes, and this made me laugh.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Vim really is an IDE, not a text editor. It's usable as an editor but overkill.

Nano serves a difference purpose. It's like telling someone on a bike that a mustang is better.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Vim is absolutely not an IDE. It has no integrations with any language. It's just a powerful text editor. You can add language plugins and configure it to be an IDE.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

That's what most IDEs are. VS Code doesn't have any native integrations. Everything is provided by plugins. The default plugins that ship with VS Code can be disabled, and you'll have just a powerful text editor.

(To do this, go to Extensions tab, click the filter icon, select "Built-in", and go down the list to disable all of them. Or just build a version with no built-in plugins.)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure, and VSCode without any plugins is a text editor, not an IDE.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

In that case every IDE is "just a text editor" because basically every IDE is built around modularity in this same way. This is just nitpicking over what is preinstalled.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Eclipse, visual studio, pycharm, idea... Those are full blown IDEs. They come with all the extras. All the text editors that can become IDEs have extensions or plugins that enable what these other actual IDE do natively.

Nowadays using vscode to debug a running program is common, but that was something only restricted to full blown IDEs some years ago, I'd say that vscode is lightweight IDE that can be expanded, but vim is a text editor first and foremost. You can't really debug code in vim AFAIK, the most you get is syntax highlighting, linting, automatic whitespace removal and auto formatting? Not sure about the last one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You cannot remove java from idea. Therefore it is not just a text editor because support for the language isn't added through an extension

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

IDEs are designed to support a software development workload. A text editor is designed to edit text files.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ah, so Code is the same as Vim if... I go out of my way to either disable things on one or install things on the other.

Or... Or... Code is an IDE (that you can strip down) and Vim is a text editor (that you can strip up).

We don't stop calling a computer one just because it can still boot without most of its modules. The default presentation matters.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

No offense intended here - But why is this being upvoted?

vim absolutely is an IDE if that is how you want to use it. Syntax highlighting, linter, language specific autocomplete, integrated sed/regex. And much, much more.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

my car is absolutely a boat if you put a boat motor on the back of it and waterproof it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

"You see here my car has positions for all the parts of a boat so it's easily made into a boat and it's already waterproof but it's just a normal car"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't know that's a fair anology. Vim does what a IDE can do without almost any setup with LazyVim and Lunar Vim and a bunch other prebaked setups. Instead of writing your vscode config in JSON or using a GUI, you can use lua. It's more like turning car into a track car or something where you're already a mechanic

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Syntax highlighting, linting, and language specific autocomplete are features supported by plugins and scripts. Plain, simple vim is a powerful extensible text editor. The extensibility makes it easy to turn into an IDE.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's syntax highlighting by default in vim though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, there is a generic syntax highlighting scheme. I had forgotten because it's not very good for some languages, I'd replaced it with a LSP-based implementation years ago.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The things you're describing are still just text editor features. An IDE generally has specific functionality for building, testing, packaging, debugging etc. for one or more programming languages/environments.

(Which vim can do if configured, I don't really have an opinion about that tbh)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

ladies please, you’re all beautiful

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You can't run and debug things in vim, can you?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It literally has a built in scripting language.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)

So it's an IDE for vimscript...? No.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yea, vim really isn't anything near how useful emacs is.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Emacs really is powerful, all it needs now is a decent text editor.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

It has one. It's called evil-mode.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

emacs is solely for watching the text version of Star Wars and you know it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Not at all what I meant. It's just, out of the box, a powerful text editor that can be configured and built on if desired. If you want it to be more than a text editor, you can easily make it so.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Eh. Both are good choices. I prefer vim for my workflows - I like the terminal.

ETA: Will have to give Emacs another go though at some point.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@kogasa Hehe, shit, so long done something wrong as I use #vim as an IDE. Okay, some own helpers, some plugins, the direct integration for #golang via LSP and since some time also ChatGPT and Copilot. But hey, it's no IDE. 🤪

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like I said, Vim can be made into an IDE by adding and configuring plugins. Basic barebones vim is designed to be a powerful, extensible text editor, not an IDE.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's designed to be an extended vi clone above anything else.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

"Vim is an IDE"

https://www.vim.org/ -> Vim is a highly configurable text editor

Press X to doubt

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In case of a house fire, I'd only escape with two things: my cat and my .vimrc

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Why do you nor have a backup of that .vimrc?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I guess it depends on if you're the type of person who sees VSCode as an IDE or just a text editor.

Vim is effectively the same way.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nano is for those that occasionally edit text files from a terminal.

Vim is for those who make a living out of it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There's a guy on Youtube who does programming language tutorials/demonstrations. Like he starts out with C++ and in one hour you're at object inheritance, crash courses I guess is the term for them.

He did one video that was as much a Vim tutorial as a tutorial for this language. "Press 3k, then enter, then i, and type "std::out("whatever C syntax is")" and then hit escape and..."

For teaching something like a little bit of Python or a little bit of Bash or whatever, I'd rather use Nano, because you can learn how to use it in seconds. Vim is an amazing tool but lord don't try to cram a Vim tutorial into another already technical tutorial.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you edit files a lot vim is worth its weight in gold. Nano makes me want to kill myself as everything takes so much longer.

Nano is perfectly sufficient for a very rare edit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Vim absolutely chews through anything you throw at it. Lots of times we need data formated or lots of SQL queries and I'm the go to guy because I understand vim macros.

Especially if you have any form of RSI.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a user accessable way to expose similar power to the common user.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not really, or that doesn't feel right to my. Word and notepad basically still do the same thing except for that word lets you add style.

Like a manual vs an automatic car, maybe?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Word is a WYSIWYG editor. We don't talk about it much these days because it's just how things are done, but it took a long time for the industry to come up with a way to display text on screen with rich formatting and have it come out the same way in print. There was a lot of buzz around it in the late 80s and early 90s.

Word solves a completely different problem than an IDE. Notepad is a raw, minimal tool that could be built on for either WYSIWYG or an IDE.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

More like Visual Studio Vs Notepad

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

For the pedants, I hope y'all can at least agree that lunarvim is an IDE:

https://www.lunarvim.org/

(Note, a comment saying it's a "bad IDE" doesn't make it not an IDE)