this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Programming
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For my money: yes, you should use an IDE or something like one, but not because you're "missing out" - rather, because a plain text editor will limit your progress.
There are (still!) people around who think it's some sort of badge of honour to only use text editors, but in reality, this means they miss the syntax errors and typoes that we all make because we are human, and end up wasting hours looking for them when an IDE would let them see them.
You wouldn't turn up at a cookery school saying "I'm still a beginner, so I'm only going to use this pair of scissors" - specialised knives and utensils are part of the chef's toolkit, and becoming a better chef is just as much about learning to use them effectively as it is about memorising recipes. It's the same with programming.
I stick with vim for years out of that sort of badge of honor. Now I use vscode and nobody is taking it from me.
You can do almost anything in vim or emacs, but I can do it faster in vscode. It's a really fantastic tool and it's completely free.
Do you use the vim plugin for VSC to keep your speedy navigation? I miss things like "select up to the next quote" but I'm not enough of a vim user to make the switch myself.
I've tried it for a bit and while it's like 90% pretty great, the last 10% is pretty annoying. Something about copy-and-paste being more frustrating when using it - I had to uninstall it.
I stick with vim because every time I try to use vscode, I get so bogged down trying to set things up and figure out how to use it that I end up just being like, "eh, fuck it - I'll do this later."
Some younger admins and engineers look upon me with awe, but really I'm just secretly a really lazy bastard. I don't even pack plugins into vim anymore to make my life easier. Just plain old vanilla vim.
At the end of the day there’s some cost-benefit analysis for time spent setting up environment vs time saved by previously setup features. Autocomplete saves a good amount of time but even something like same-file-word suggestion can save a lot of time without any setup.
Yeah, for sure - I don't deny that at all. For me, it's a confluence of general burnout, laziness, and comfort with what I already know... and likely not a really urgent need to move to a proper IDE. The majority of my coding is small, one-off Python scripts where I can
:wqand run it and then open it back up to refine, fix bugs, add debugging prints, etc.Even for that there are some nice (vim and otherwise) features where clicking on an error automatically opens up the right file and sets the cursor at the location of the error. Or just seeing errors in a separate panel from the rest of the code.
Yeah, I used to configure vim with syntax highlighting and auto-suggestions and whatever else. I just like... don't anymore. I've been feeling less burned out over the last few months and it seems, at least, like its still lifting slowly. Maybe when I get the energy back, I'll take another crack at vscode.
I actually went back to (neo)vim because I found vscode was not quite keyboard-driven enough for my wants. But especially with neovim you can torture it into basically being a IDE with all the available plugins out there (e.g. in my setup I have highlighting, code completion, reporting of syntax errors and forth)
VSCode + Vim extension is where it’s at
Yes and the refactoring, suggestions and, in some cases, debugging tools are also very useful.
I used to be a text editor only kind of person and thought it meant I was a better programmer who didn't need a crutch. In reality, I was wasting time whenever I wanted to rename something, never had any help regarding the standard library so wasted time looking up parameter ordering and namespace names. I had to compile to find syntax errors.
With an IDE, I can pretty proficiently write code in (almost) any language thrown at me if it gives me linting and suggestions. I'm nowhere near as fast as in languages I'm comfortable with but it's such a huge help that it gets me most of the way there.