Vim as you IDE

by haridas • 14 years ago

162 101 14 years ago

Legion2• 14 years ago

I think it's a Vim rite of passage to write these posts. Just reading this one now makes me want to write my own, even though I know everyone has seen them a million times and has little interest in my Vim special flower.

s00pcan3• 14 years ago

Would anyone be interested in a writeup of my setup? Arch Linux + xmonad + tmux + urxvt + zsh + vim. No desktop environment, just a setup optimized for reliable web development. I've been building this setup from scratch at work and at home for the past year, so I've got most of the minor annoyances figured out.

dllthomas• 14 years ago

I'd be mildly interested; Debian + ratpoison + screen + urxvt + vim, here, so there's bound to be similarities but differences might also be enlightening.

tammer2• 14 years ago

I use precisely the same setup, and love it. Full control over every tool in the whole chain.

I'd add one more that I find essential: Pentadactyl. Without it, the context switch when using a browser really disrupts the flow.

evoxed• 14 years ago

I'm doing primarily web dev at the moment after a loooong err, "sabbatical", just started using vim, and waiting for my drive to come so I can finally have a stable Arch boot. So yes, I'd be very interested!

frou_dh2• 14 years ago

I'd love to see that. I'm a fan of tiling windows and a custom Arch setup is my escape plan if OS X goes off the rails.

haridas13• 14 years ago

That's interesting setup. Waiting to see how it looks like.

jcurbo• 14 years ago

Interested as well. debian + awesome + vim + urxvt and I am always looking for more ways to make it better.

donniezazen• 14 years ago

Arch + DWM + URXVT + VIM here and love it. Tiling WM are so convenient. I am a little too apprehensive using Xmonad, dont have enough time to mess with haskell.

jentulman• 14 years ago

Yes, very much. I'm deving with Eclipse on OS X, but have been wanting to move away from Apple/OS X since Lion appeared and a linux xmonad setup seems intriguing so have been reading up on similar things and every extra helps.

uggedal• 14 years ago

Sounds similar to my setup: Arch Linux, monsterwm, dwb, urxvt, zsh, tmux, vim. All managed with salt[1] and keeping dotfiles in git[2].

[1] http://github.com/uggedal/states

[2] http://github.com/uggedal/dotfiles

achompas• 14 years ago

Yes please! I'd like to take the dive into Arch Linux at some point, this kind of post would be super helpful.

o1iver• 14 years ago

Exactly my setup :) Although, since xmonad I don't use tmux that much anymore!

david_shaw3• 14 years ago

First off, I'm sure that with the (recent?) surge in "check out my super efficient setup" posts, a write up of your config would be fairly well received.

The real reason I'm responding is to throw in my $0.02 that for those that want an easy and efficient tiling window manager setup, but don't want to go through the relative pain of xmonad, `awesome` is a great substitute. I've used it for years now, and although my office hardware changed from an old-ish ArchLinux box to a Macbook Pro, I'm still an avid fan of tiling WM's. Even on OS X, the first app I install is always 'DoublePane' to mimic the functionality. [1]

As efficient as vim shortcuts can make you while banging out code, I am a firm believer that most window managers are absolutely and completely inefficient. Most people whom I convince to give a tiling, scriptable WM a try never look back.

It's vim efficiency for everything you do!

[1] I'm not affiliated with DoublePane in any way, and there are alternatives out there. That said, for $1.99 (last I checked), it does an incredible job of increasing my efficiency on my Mac.

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

Arch + xmonad + Screen + urxvt + Bash + Vim here, though I've found my use of Screen has dropped significantly since switching from KDE to xmonad, because the tiling is done right in the WM. I've got certificate-based login and Bash aliases set up for all my frequently accessed servers, so it's easy to open new terminals. The only real need for Screen is for stuff that needs to be persistent, but I try to avoid using persistency whenever possible, because it would just lead to me opening 100+ terminals in a Screen session, much like I do in Firefox (also not a good thing, but I haven't found a solution yet).

prpatel• 14 years ago

HAH, vim looks more and more like emacs :)

rit• 14 years ago

As I recall, that was always the idea behind Vim. To bring the power and flexibility the author appreciated in EMACS to the style and interface of Vi.

There's value to be found in taking the best of multiple worlds into one product.

I for example, cut my teeth on Bill Joy VI, and the keystrokes are burned permanently and naturally into my brain. I love the extra stuff that Vim gives me, because it is a natural extension of that toolset that I started with.

mhd3• 14 years ago

Well, you've got to use your memory above the first 640K for something.

insertnickname3• 14 years ago

I'm sure the article is interesting, but the writing is awful.

haridas13• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feed back. Actually I'm not good at explaining things,Sorry that's not an excuse. I'm always trying to improve my language and presentation skill.

jufo• 14 years ago

It's a great article. Assuming English isn't your first language, I think @insertnickname is being unfair.

insertnickname3• 14 years ago

I hope you're not misinterpreting my criticism. I didn't mean to humiliate you or make fun of you, I was just trying to let you know that you should improve your writing skills. I am not a great writer, but I do try to do my best and I am sure you do the best you can too. If I was too harsh in my original comment – which it now seems that I was – I apologize.

tspiteri• 14 years ago

Many times, improvements come from just iterating over the text and rewriting parts of it. Native speakers will need less iterations, and very few people can write really well the first time round.

saryant• 14 years ago

I've been content with the Janus[1] extensions for about a year now but I just added MiniBufExplorer and I'm really enjoying that.

I typically keep three panes open, one of which is NERDTree. Right now my biggest gripe is the strange highlighting of the Play! framework's template files. The files are name.scala.html which results in weird highlighting of the inline Scala. I have yet to find a good solution (admittedly I haven't looked in a while) to this but if someone knows of one I'd love to hear it.

[1] https://github.com/carlhuda/janus

haridas13• 14 years ago

I hope this would be helpful to you - https://github.com/sjl

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

Or I can use a text editor like TM2 or ST2 and turn on vim bindings and get 80% of the way there (that's a generous 20% for all of the vim hotkeys that don't work in the emulated modes).

bcrescimanno• 14 years ago

What I've found with "vim modes" is that I get the wrong 80%. It's really about how you approach development; in my world, it's very editing-centric. For others, it's tool-centric. If I can get 100% of the editing environment I want with 80% of the tools I want, I'm happier than I would be with your suggestion which would be reversed.

mhd3• 14 years ago

Or you can use a few plugins to get 80% of the "missing" features of something like TM2/ST2. Especially if terminal/cross-platform support is an issue.

Whatever floats your boat, any half-way decent expandable editor should be able to emulate other editors features with some effort.

Corollary: Whatever you do, there still will be some rabid CygnusEd fan complaining.

Legion2• 14 years ago

80%? Every attempt I make to use a Vim emulation mode doesn't get 20 seconds without failing to replicate Vim behavior on even fairly basic things.

weaksauce2• 14 years ago

What features do they fail on typically? Have you tried Xvim? It's far from perfect(still alpha) but it's got a lot going for it. It turns out Vim has a lot of features and it takes a while to get to a polished state.

Derbasti3• 14 years ago

Then check out Evil for Emacs and ViEmu for Visual Studio.

ViEmu even supports something like nnoremap in its .viemurc.

Case in point: My first introduction to Vim was through ViEmu.

njharman• 14 years ago

If you're using a language that (practically) requires an IDE, or, you really want what the modern idea of IDE is. You probably want to look elsewhere.

That, or grok that Unix is the IDE. Vim is just the editor component.

haridas13• 14 years ago

You are absolutely correct. I started to use Vim as main editor (Around 6 Month) only after realizing the easiness of its command based editing, not looking after its plugins. I tried to explain that in the blog summary portion. Then why we need all those plugins ?. It just add extra features, who don't like it ?

mhd3• 14 years ago

There's plenty of middle ground to stand on. By choosing vim alone, you already deviated from Unix purism (rabid Unix purists aren't that happy with bog-standard vi, either).

Saving round-trips to she shell ain't necessarily evil. Separate unix tools are great, but e.g. presenting info in the editor is quite helpful. Ctags does your parsing, but you can display it with tagbar. Language-specific tools do linting, but you can display it in the editor with syntastic…

googletron• 14 years ago

this post might be interesting to some looking into zsh + vim + tmux

http://www.mahdiyusuf.com/post/24784023641/beautiful-tools

haridas13• 14 years ago

I tried zsh for a while after seeing its colorful features. But IMHO it lacks command rendering and auto complete speed compared to bash.

3amOpsGuy• 14 years ago

Over the years I seem to have gone full circle with Vim. These days I lean towards few or even no plugins - snipmate is the last plugin i'm struggling to eliminate.

This is more than likely a factor of my environment though. I'm frequently using Vim "away from home" so to speak.

Best approach for this i've found so far is to set a $VIMINIT on remote login (i.e. an admittedly clunky combination of SendEnv set for Host * in ~/.ssh/config). Still on the lookout for a better way though.

SeanDav• 14 years ago

I have been so spoiled. I have never been much of a Microsoft fan (except for Excel, best software ever) but have done most of my development in C, C++, C# using Microsoft IDE's which as everyone knows are pretty much the dogs bollocks. I do Java development using Eclipse.

Always wanted to know what to use as a general purpose IDE that is ideally cross platform and was looking for opinions on whether these VIM layouts might be suitable?

mkmkmmmmm4• 14 years ago

I've found vim is the finest code editor I've ever used, but it's a crap IDE in terms of organizing a project, compiling, and debugging all from one software. Disclaimer A: I haven't spent a ton of time trying to make it an IDE, and B: I have the misfortune ;) of being an iPhone dev, and only Xcode plays nice with the devices and simulator.

If anyone can prove me wrong, please, please, please do so, because vim is just awesome for editing code.

terhechte• 14 years ago

Not entirely true. Appcode, an alternative IDE, also works fine with development on devices and the simulator. I haven't heard of an open source plugin to do this yet, though. So no way to do that for vim. (There's a vim plugin for app code though, it's not perfect but ok).

sea6ear• 14 years ago

Honestly, for an IDE replacement rather than just an editor, I'd suggest Emacs rather than Vim.

Reasons:

* Emacs plays well with other programs, you can start other shells, language interpreters etc, from within Emacs and interact with them easily. There are some Vim plugins that try to enable this but I've always found them less satisfying.

* Emacs is usable in all the same scenarios as Vim (i.e. cross-platform, over ssh, dual GUI/Terminal ability, screen/tmux/dvtm compatible etc)

Random Thoughts:

Vim is an amazing editor but I've always found that these attempts to add features to make it into an IDE cause it to start to feel clunky.

Emacs on the other hand, plugins generally work well (except when they don't).

Vim (or at least vi) is installed on basically every Unix install (and available for install everywhere). Emacs is installable everywhere also but setup generally takes a bit longer.

If you are going to use Emacs and you are intrigued by Vim style keybindings, I've found Emacs Evil-mode to be one of the best Vim emulation packages that I've tried (most Vim emulation packages will eventually cause frustration - Evil mostly doesn't).

I find that I use Vim more when I'm switching between a lot of different computers, and Emacs when I'm mostly developing on one stable computer setup.

So my workflow in a particular environment is usually, first install Vim so I can get work done, and as I use the environment more I'll end up installing Emacs and gradually switching over to it.

wildanimal• 14 years ago

But if you look at Emacs-as-IDE route taken by EDE/CEDET suite, it's a kludgy beast... (I don't know how large the EDE/CEDET user community is, but most people I know forsake it in favor of the simpler facilities in Emacs).

ww520• 14 years ago

Shouldn't it be VIM + Shell as your IDE?

haridas13• 14 years ago

Hmm... That make sense. But the title should be a simple one.

pimentel• 14 years ago

I didn't get how to get syntastic to check PEP8 compliance. I have it along with pyflakes, and never seen such an error (I don't believe I'm that PEP8 compliant myself)

EDIT: oh, nevermind, just needed pip's flake8 package

mkramlich2• 14 years ago

I don't read tutorials written by people with bad English. Life's too short, and too many better alternatives already exist.

state• 14 years ago

I agree, but also find it hilarious that this title is on the front page.

petercooper• 14 years ago

You'd almost think the mods on HN were more interested in screwing up useful titles than fixing ones that are actually broken.

haridas13• 14 years ago

Ha.. ha.. Actually I missed the 'r' while posting it on HN and I noticed it after an hour. No way to change the title. I tried to proof read my article to make it correct as much as possible.

daviddaviddavid• 14 years ago

"too many better alternatives already exist"

This is utterly false. In academia you will find numerous peer-reviewed journals which have high percentages of non-native English speaking authors. You'd probably find many articles in such journals to contain "bad English". But they're often doing totally original research and so, no, better alternatives don't exist.

We live in an era where English is the de-facto language of the internet and some of the most brilliant people aren't native speakers of English and so might be considered to have "bad English". Not reading their work seems like a perfect way to miss out on learning things you might not otherwise learn.

mkramlich2• 14 years ago

> "too many better alternatives already exist" > This is utterly false.

There are tutorials on VIM in English that are well written. Many are good. Thus, my claim is not "utterly false" it is true. If I did not think it was true and had not seen evidence that it was true I would not have said so.

> Not reading their work seems like a perfect way to miss out on learning things you might not otherwise learn.

There is an overflowing abundance of material from which to learn in the world. In English alone, even. And there is only a small finite amount of time and energy that I have available for focusing on it. Thus I try to filter out the crappier stuff. Thus I filter out things in bad English when better alternatives exist. This does not seem like an unwise strategy.

Derbasti3• 14 years ago

Funny. I was at more or less that point about two years ago. My desire for more of that lead down a slippery slope that ended in Emacs. And for some reason I am now coming full circle and realize that I don't actually require a lot of these plugins any more.

I'm still trying to figure out why I feel that way.

jcaimbridge• 14 years ago

I love vim and I've used it for many years, but for programming I've found the "code understanding" features of an IDE to be as valuable as the dexterity that vim allows in terms of input and navigation. I do not simply mean syntax checking--a baseline in my opinion, but more of things like inheritance hierarchy navigation, refactoring of code (e.g. renaming all instances of a particular local variable, a particular function, etc etc, without the risk of a simple text substitution), mark occurrences (showing all of the reads and/or writes of a particular the variable under the cursor in all views), and so on. It is even better if your IDE can run parts of the compiler on the fly (an instructor once told me that eclipse does this with java. However, I'm not sure if it's feasible for something like C++ due to the complexity of the language). And then you have all of the other features of the IDE at your fingertips too (e.g. an integrated debugger or profiler).

A few years ago I searched high and low for something satisfactory that combines the text editing/navigation of vim with the extremely useful features of an IDE. The closest thing I could find for C++ was Netbeans combined with the jVi plugin. The VIM functionality provided by such a setup is not too barebones, and the IDE fills in the gaps where other VIM plugins may have been used. There may be something better now, but I've grown accustomed to this setup and it takes a substantial amount of time and effort to reroll.

There is also Eclipse CDT and the "eclim" plugin for it (which actually uses an existing vim process. Since this means that all of the other vim functionality and vim plugins work in tandem with the IDE, this is the ideal setup), but I recall that there was much lacking with both Eclipse CDT and "eclim" itself (I do not recall exactly what, but, again, this was a few years ago). Things may be different now and I encourage anyone looking for something similar to take a peek at both Netbeans with the jVi plugin and Eclipse CDT with the eclim plugin.

spullara• 14 years ago

If your IDE doesn't do isomorphic refactorings reliably it is really just an editor.

kamaal4• 14 years ago

When will be the day when this sort of a thing gets shipped with the default vim installation?

The reasons I say this is every time somebody brings up the apparent ancientness of vim/emacs people point to something like this. I agree that all this is doable, but you must realize tailoring a vanilla installation with plugins to do all this is really difficult for most programmers. Especially if you want newbies to start with using vim.

If people wanted to use an IDE, they would use an IDE- There are plenty available these days. All it takes is going to go to the eclipse website, and downloading one. Why in the world would any body spend hours(days?) hunting all these basic plugins which are must have for today's software development needs?

Somethings like auto complete in ST2 looks to just give what the user wants. In vim you would be doomed press ctrl-n as and when you need it, but it happens automatically with ST2.All these modern GUI based editors are basically these many tiny optimization on old concepts .There is also that file browser that gets opened by default on the left hand side. The minimap on the right hand side. The search functionality using ctrl-p. These are few tiny yet useful automations that should ship with vim/emacs by default. I see no reason why they shouldn't. Apart from trying to sell themselves as endlessly customizable editors, they must also do many of tiny day to day needs by default.

Things like package managers, a proper good looking GUI et al are must have things in any software tool these days. Arcane 80's style GUI, default tooling support for software development needs going two decades back is not going to fly.

darkandbrooding• 14 years ago

I guess I'd fall into the "Unix as an IDE" camp, so I'm glad that by default Vim is "just" an editor. I think it's great fun to see how people have tricked out their Vim installations, but I confess I view those custom Vim setups kind of like I do tricked out hot rods, or Burning Man art installations. I hope people never stop producing arbitrarily complex Vim installations, because software can be art.

nfm• 14 years ago

I respectfully disagree. Choosing to use a graphical IDE or a terminal based editor is a matter of personal preference; it's foolish to proclaim one or the other as universally superior. There are pros and cons to each, and they are fundamentally different in many ways.

Yes, vim is old, but it's not a web browser - it's for manipulating text (or in our case, code), the process of which has changed little in the last 30 years.

Before writing vim off, pair program with someone who is masterful at it and you'll see some if its many pros first hand. Yes, this may take (quite literally) years of use and customization to achieve, but no, it's certainly not something you can write off as obsolete or inferior.

kamaal4• 14 years ago

This is the issue, if you a need a vim master and a couple of pair programming session to learn what vim is, you are doing it the wrong way.

Why is it wrong to enable auto suggest by default? Or the file browser or minimap by default? Why not enable directory level grep/search by default? Why do you need to learn two decade old arcane 3 fold command sets for simple search-replace. Why aren't line numbers turned on by default? Why not provide tabbing by default?

None of what I have mentioned is something uncommon to developers. Every developer needs to this almost everyday with his code.

If you see modern day GUI based editors, they are basically designed to solve these daily little recurring annoyances and made available to you out of the box without you have to do to too much of tinkering. Like everything needs of developers change with time.

Software usability is a very important aspect of software engineering.

My primary concern is in assuming the usage of difficult tools as geeky and cool. By merely learning how to use a two decade difficult to use tool doesn't make a person a great programmer.

barbs• 14 years ago

I agree. I also prefer the approach of making an IDE "vim-like" by adding vim keybindings and such, rather than going the other way round.

eupharis2• 14 years ago

  Why in the world would any body spend hours(days?) hunting all these basic
  plugins which are must have for today's software development needs?

These plugins are "must haves" if you are used to using an IDE. But they are not prerequisities of creating good software. Proof: plenty of good software has been and is being created without such plugins.

You are used to the file browser on the left, the minimap on the right, the search function bound just so. So you want that. But not all vim users are used to that.

The simplicity of vim is what drew me. There aren't a hundred and one "project files" (whatever those are) added to any bit of code I want to work on. There aren't a hundred and one buttons everywhere. There is the code on the screen. Nothing else.

Adding lots of extra file-trees and variable-lists and computer-guessing-what-you-want-to-do in the default vim install seems like it would scare away more users from vim than it would draw. For the modern GUI kid (like me and I assume you), getting used to modes and the vim keybindings was hard enough. Let the user add windows and features at her own pace, as she gets comfortable.

One other thing before you write off the "arcane 80's style" editors:

The second fact that drew me to vim is that it was esteemed by men who I respected.

Look at the powerful minds that have built such beautiful things with vim and emacs. There are two explanations for their devotion to their editors:

1) They are used to vim/emacs. They like them because they are used to them.

2) They are technologists. They have an innate fascination with the novel, the bold, the capacity for an innovative idea to change everything. Yet even with this prejudice, they love truth enough not to sacrifice the old superior tool for the new, fashionable one.

After the first few frustrated sessions with vim, where I cursed at it for not behaving like a text editor "should" behave, I believed very strongly that explanation 1 must be true.

But the power (sorry, that's the right word) I feel when I fire up vim grows everyday. It grew today after reading this excellent blog post and discovering some new, wonderful plugins. And everyday I grow more convinced that explanation 2 drives the loyalty to vim.

haridas13• 14 years ago

I got your point. I explained the same thing on my summary portion of my blog. I left eclipse for Vim was after seeing its advantage of basic mode based editing. All others are just additions, you can add them when ever required. Check this out also about my detailed explanation of how did that happen to me - http://haridas.in/how-i-came-in-to-vim.html

kamaal4• 14 years ago

You can live your life without phones, internet, buses, cars or any kind of modern technology.

And yes you will need them only if you have used them. Because people around a century back didn't need them.

You can still live in a jungle. But the question is, should you?

slowpoke2• 14 years ago

>tailoring a vanilla installation

>newbies to start with using vim.

Sorry, but what? The very last thing a newbie programmer should be doing is configuring plugins. A newbie programmer doesn't need plugins. They only serve to confuse. Which is also why the very worst thing you can do to a newbie programmer is to give them an IDE.

vim is perfect for newbies. It just works, and the defaults are mostly sane[1]. Yes, there's a slight learning curve, but you can do basic text editing (enough for writing any Hello World program and then some) after taking 20 minutes to do vimtutor, and from then on it just gets more powerful.

You can add plugins when you actually need them. A newbie doesn't need plugins. They just need a good text editor - and vim (and Emacs) is the best you can get. No fancy editor or IDE of the week will ever change that. Not Eclipse, not Visual Studio, not ST2, nor whatever else.

Another thing: I refuse to take anyone serious who even brings up the "argument" of "arcance 80's style GUIs" and/or "modern GUIs". Why? Because in the overwhelming majority of cases, that means "vim doesn't have drop shadows, it sucks"[2] (or some variation of that).

Nobody even knows what a "modern" GUI is supposed to be. It's just a fuzzy way to say "I don't actually have any tangible arguments against $thing so I'm just going to accuse it of not fullfilling unwritten, non-existing standards that no one has ever agreed on.". Or in other words, bullshitting.

[1]: Really, the only things I did when I started with vim was to ":set number" and ":syntax on", then put that in the .vimrc. That's it. Everything else was added on demand.

[2]: Yes, I actually had someone trying to argue this to me. I closed the comment page and burst into laughter.

kamaal4• 14 years ago

My god, you make it look as though using vim is a goal for a programmer. While the actual goal is to use something like vim to do a job.

The original argument is modern day editors aim to automate most recurring demands of a programmer out of the box.

The point in most pro-vim/emacs arguments it to make you take the most difficult route to achieving text manipulation tasks. Hoping that will make you good at text manipulation over time. While the point is you are trying to gain a expertise which you don't need.

Going by that argument you don't need any kind of an modern GUI ever. Why ATM's? Why graphically friendly email clients? And you could go like this for nearly everything.

You need modern editors because you always need to take steps forward in the usability game.

kayoone• 14 years ago

Everytime someone writes a post about vim we see these editor wars emerge again and there seems no real solution, as it is mostly "use what works best for you". There are amazing software engineers using vim, and others using Eclipse with Java on Windows like notch or Visual Studio like John Carmack. Use whats you feel comfortable with.

Personally i like the simplicity of vim for editing taks, i could see me writing javascript or any other scripting language with it. But for complex software i definately would miss the abilities of modern IDEs, be it only for refactoring.

jacobr• 14 years ago

I really would like ctags to work well with JavaScript, but I'm using require.js and Exuberant ctags really doesn't like that.

Vim as you IDE

Related Stories