Hey, I’m Irakli, Software Engineer from Tbilisi, Georgia. I have 8 years of experience working on scalable apps for EU, US and Georgian companies On-Site and Remotely. I mastered my skills by working with an amazing team of engineers and designers in different startups and companies where I learned to write scalable and maintainable code, make pixel-perfect UI/UX and shipping high-quality products.
Same here! I've been using both Vim (4 year) and Tmux (2 year) and I noticed I was actually spending more time configuring my text editor rather than just writing code. So I switched first to Atom and then to VSCode and I'm supper happy with the result.
I've been using vim since 2009 and tmux for the last 5 years. Initially, I had to figure out how things worked, and that took some time, but I never spent any time configuring it now except if I find a new plugin and figure out a new feature I'd like to add.
Nothing works out of the box, especially if you are trying to make two plugins work nicely with each other.
If you want IDE like features i.e Autocomplete than you have to spend days to make it work and even after that it doesn't work like other "GUI" editors.
+ Terminal interface is very limiting to have nice plugins...
> Nothing works out of the box, especially if you are trying to make two plugins work nicely with each other.
Indeed, but it doesn't really matter since the default experience in VSCode or IntelliJ or Xcode or any other IDE or editor doesn't work for me out of the box either. I have to change things anyways, and I can't change VSCode or IntelliJ or Xcode to fit my liking, but I've been able to change tmux+vim to it, although it could be even better.
> If you want IDE like features i.e Autocomplete than you have to spend days to make it work and even after that it doesn't work like other "GUI" editors.
For stuff like Go, Rust, Elixir, Python and so on, it works fine with when just installing the default "brand" plugin. Taking python as an example: even though "intellisense" in vim is worse than in pycharm, the rest of pycharm is so much worse than tmux+vim. "Intellisense" not being 100% in tmux+vim is not a dealbreaker for me at all. I can get by without "intellisense". But pycharm is so much worse for everything else than "intellisense", from basic editing to opening files to running shell commands and everything else I use all the time, which is a deal-breaker for me. For something like iOS+Mac development where I feel like I can't work without proper "intellisense", I do use Xcode.
> + Terminal interface is very limiting to have nice plugins...
Indeed, but still, even though tmux+vim sucks on some points because it's text-based, it doesn't suck enough to not be usable, and all these other editors and IDEs like IntelliJ, xcode, netbeans, sublimetext, vscode, atom and so on complete sucks for all the important things I need, which is a deal-breaker.
> Indeed, but it doesn't really matter since the default experience in VSCode or IntelliJ or Xcode or any other IDE or editor doesn't work for me out of the box either. I have to change things anyways, and I can't change VSCode or IntelliJ or Xcode to fit my liking, but I've been able to change tmux+vim to it, although it could be even better.
I disagree. The default settings of Visual studio work perfectly fine for me. As an added advantage, I can use other developers in my companies workstations to show them something quickly if I need
> For stuff like Go, Rust, Elixir, Python and so on, it works fine with when just installing the default "brand" plugin.
and so on? I'm a C++ developer. Setting up C++ autocomplete is anything but straightforward in vim and emacs
> I disagree. The default settings of Visual studio work perfectly fine for me.
That's lucky for you, but unfortunately, it's not the case for me at all.
> As an added advantage, I can use other developers in my companies workstations to show them something quickly if I need
I might be using other peoples computers 10 hours a year, but I'm using my own maybe as much as 2200 hours a year. It doesn't seem logical to take the first scenario into account when deciding whether to customise ones setup or not, but it's indeed a nice bonus if ones optimal setup is the default one that every other developer is using too.
> and so on? I'm a C++ developer. Setting up C++ autocomplete is anything but straightforward in vim and emacs
I don't use C++ anymore, but 7 years back when I did, it worked good enough for my use case, and the problem with other IDEs and editors were the same back then as it is now, where they were actually hindering my work, which a less than perfect "intellisense" doesn't at all. YMMV.
Have you actually tried to get YouCompleteMe[1] to work for C/C++ autocomplete? It's a huge PIA. Autocomplete just works in VSCode and many other IDEs once you point them at the right directory.
I'm a front end web dev who decided to learn C (the other week actually). Took about 5 minutes to download and install YouCompleteMe.. What problems did you have?
The one problem I had was that I had to use the system version of clang as I'm using Arch.
Basically I am not able to compile my particular codebase in clang or gcc too easily since it's an embedded system. But many other IDEs have no problem inferring autocompletion without requiring compilation.
YouCompleteMe itself was a bit of an issue as I have to develop in Windows and it's not quite as well supported.
Having to compile YCM for on an embedded system sounds like quite the corner case, and I can certainly see why you might have issues.
That said, there is a fair bit of built-in auto completion in vanilla vim (on par with VSC), and a few quick rebinds might be all you need. I would suggest checking it out.
:help 24.3
(I wish it were indexed a bit better in the help files. :/ )
You should use a different completion plugin then. YCM is the only one that needs to be compiled. If you use regular vim, check out neocomplete, and if you use neovim, well, you should know about deoplete (it's kickass). Both of these pretty much work out of the box; they have accompanying clang sources (vim-clang or deoplete-clang) that feed the suggestions to neocomplete/deoplete.
Frankly, I would use neovim + deoplete. Modern, async, and a big user community right now (almost everyone with neovim runs deoplete).
Given that I am currently a windows user on visual studio, I'm not exactly sure how I would get started with neovim and deoplete. The instructions on deoplete [0] assume you're not running on windows, to start, and looking in the issues [1] It's not supported
I use YouCompleteMe for all my autocompleting needs (Python, Go, Rust, C) and it works quite well for me. My experience was that it was literally as easy as (copying the command straight from my shell history):
I use Emacs for C++ and I've tried a wide variety of auto complete packages, never really getting them to work properly. And the result is that Ive learned that I can be just as productive without auto complete as I was with it. In fact, I might even be more insightful into what I'm working on, because instead of relying on a pop-up menu for an API, I actually have to look at API documentation and properly learn it that way , which usually gives me much more knowledge about what I'm trying to do
Usually because the box doesn't have coreutils, make and exctags installed. Bloated plugins are snakeoil, they push vim to the dark^WIDE side, where the battle is too Pyrrhic to win.
Same exact experience here. Like, I could never get ES6 highlighting to work in Vim. Just flat out didn't work, so all non-ES5 code I write looks terrible. Could be a conflict with my theme or something else. I don't know, or care to do the work to figure it out.
I used Vim for a good 5 years. I still miss many things about it, but a shitty default UX is not one of them.
I feel ya. tmux+vim looks terrible compared to for example VSCode. Problem is that VSCode just works much worse (for me at least) for editing code, navigation, running commands and so on, and I'd rather have an ugly editor that works great, than the opposite.
For anyone else who happens by and has the same issue, vim had (has?) substandard syntax highlighting for javascript. Pulling in pangloss's vim-javascript (https://github.com/pangloss/vim-javascript) fixed that up for me. If you write JSX, you can pull in https://github.com/mxw/vim-jsx to get great highlighting for that too.
Yeah exactly... Main objective is just to write code, nothing more. No editor is perfect for me atm, VSCode eats my battery and it lacks some features but at least I'm only focused on writing code and having features that actually work...
I tried switching to VSCode earlier this week and am really having a hard time with it. I'm coming from iterm/vim/tmux. The most painful part has been the lack of a hot key to bring up VSCode. Besides that, I've found that switching between open files in vim (which I use <leader> and buffer number for) is much easier than VSCode (ctrl + number).
edit: Just opened VSCode again and noticed one other major thing that has been driving me crazy. In vim I often have files open in different panes and then make one pane full size while editing. Can't do that with splits in VSCode as far as I know.
Past: Cabal (https://getcabal.com) (YCombinator S21), Shogun (https://getshogun.com) (YCombinator W18), Gametime (https://gametime.co), Ministry of Health of Georgia.