0

I am trying to find a good IDE. I always found Vim's modal behaviour interesting but, Vim is more of a text editor than an IDE. Even though I have made a few changes to my .vimrc file Vim isn't IDE enough. Any suggestions?

FYI: By IDE I mean it's got to have a debugger, autocomplete and easy compilation

Edit: I do web development, backend node.js, python and Ruby on Rails

TheBestCoder
  • 43
  • 1
  • 8
  • 1
    Use a vim plugin in what ever IDE you want – FDinoff May 07 '15 at 03:54
  • vim will never be as powerful as a dedicated ide, not matter what plugin you use. The most reasonable solution is two mix a bit of both. You want to refactor some code using an ide, use your ide. You just want to edit some code, use the power of vim. For example, the eclipse plugin vrapper allow you to quickly launch a vim instance with the current file. – Xavier T. May 07 '15 at 08:54

3 Answers3

1
  1. To be good at vim you need time, but it will eventually pay off
  2. The mindset 'hunt for cool plugins to assemble your IDE' often leads to suboptimal solutions
  3. Start with a small .vimrc and maybe a small amount of plugins (if you tell what is your programming environment people could help you here)
  4. Use what you have for a while and observe where are you spending most of your time struggling
  5. Search for a way to alleviate that problem and repeat
  6. Get use to read vim help (:h). It may sound boring but is one of the best sources to really grok vim and that will bring you closer to the 'vim mindset'

Vim is an investment, not a tool you can decide to start using by tomorrow and be good at it.

If you want to spend most of your time coding (text editing) and are willing to put the time and effort it will pay eventually off and you would be very efficient. If you don't accept this it can be frustrating and make you quit.

Take a look at this: What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?

It also depends what your programming environment is. Having autocomplete and compiling from in the vim editor is no problem. Debugging depends, but you can also do debugging with other tools and be perfectly fine. Just because other IDEs do it doesn't mean it's the best way.

Don't try to get it perfect just from the beginning and don't try to copy every feature your known IDE has. Accept the initial pain and enjoy all those little improvements that you can make every single day. All those improvements will sum up and after a while you will be very proficient. Even years after you still will find ways to improve your workflow.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Maximiliano Padulo
  • 1,452
  • 11
  • 22
1

I'd start by listing features you need from your IDE in order of importance.

Think about (random order):

  • Language support (native support/need to import specific plugin)
  • project tools support (eg. cmake, maven, gradle, so you can easily switch between different environments)
  • editor power (make your changes fast, refactor easily, repeat changes, shortcuts and tricks etc.)
  • version control support
  • easy to use
  • completion, snippets, etc.
  • speed (how long it takes to launch, how much memory/cpu it consumes)
  • compilation speed/support

Of course you can consider many more features and find them much more important than the ones I listed here. It's totally individual preference, since that's you who has to be comfortable.

If you want to use the power of VIM you have basically three options:

1. use VIM, customize it and make it your unique IDE, totally adopted to your needs

Start with vanilla VIM and incrementally add settings and plugins you need. Check out existing configs and adapt them. To make it fully fledged IDE I'd recommend some plugins:

  • CtrlP - fuzzy seach, really powerful, must-have
  • NerdTree - classic file browser
  • vim-dispatch - for deployment, fast and easy
  • vim-git, vim-gitgutter, vim-fugitive - for awesome version control
  • xptemplate, supertab, syntastic - for autocompletion and snippets
  • vimgdb - for debugging

2. Use existing VIM config

I recommend one of these: Example VIM configs

or this: janus

3. Use IDE with VIM plugin/mode

Many of today's top IDEs have vim-mode or vim plugin easily available. For C++ I recommend QtCreator, because it's really fast and easy-to-use, and it's FakeVIM mode works really well. For JVM-based languages I recommend IntelliJ IDEA, because it's really powerful and stable. It's VIM plugin also works really well, and you can easily mix IDE's shortcuts with VIM commands, adapting it to your needs.

Both can be customized with many useful settings placed in your home directory (for IntelliJ it has to be .ideavimrc).

qiubix
  • 1,302
  • 13
  • 22
1

There has been recent development in (at least) those three projects, based on nvim extensibility, and addressing your very concern:

I seems that they are all in early alpha though, let's hope the best for them :)

iago-lito
  • 3,098
  • 3
  • 29
  • 54