Your life as a developer depending on what you choose as an editor.
Let's compare and contrast your experience if you go down either of these paths. Feel free to branch the conversation on to other editors but I felt like this is the most relevant debate today.
Oldest comments (65)
VSCode is fantastic for large projects. I need the Intellisense training wheels at all times otherwise I would get nothing done.
Vim is nice for editing one line edits from the terminal or writing out a text file. Can't see myself ever using it for development
Out of the box, Vim isn't an environment that's terribly good for development. It does take some work to get it into a state where it's a genuinely good development environment because that tends to be language-specific.
I mostly do PHP, with some Javascript too, and I have, among other plugins, vim-ale for linting in multiple languages, and Deoplete for autocompletion. I also use PHPActor, which not only integrates with Deoplete to provide reasonably smart PHP completion, but also provides numerous refactoring tools of the sort that used to be the sole providence of IDE's.
In short, it can be done, but it's a very personal choice as to whether you think it's worth it for your own workflow. In my case, I have a degree of RSI from a previous non-coding role and it gets aggravated by using the mouse, so my workflow is very keyboard-heavy, and Vim fits that like a glove. I did migrate to Neovim nearly two years ago, but the experience is virtually identical.
In the Vim, the size of the project is not limited. He doesn't care if there are 20 files in the directory or 20,000, whether the file has 20 lines or 20 million.
Vscode wins cup🤾♂️🏆🥇
all community support extension and from web development perspective it is beast
It's camelCase, bro.
Yes I know but auto typing
Vim is amazingly powerful - but I can't be bothered to keep a map of key shortcuts in my brain.
VS Code - I might lose some time pointing and clicking, but it requires no extra mental arithmetic.
I can save that effort for creative problem solving. :)
I should add that I do have a level of envy for people who can do the former (including emacs users) - its impressive and I admire it. It's just one skill I've been unable to learn
I love Vim, but currently I work with Javascript and use VSCode. For me, Vim is terrible on autocompleting in JS. Even Coc plugin does not fit well for me.
They are both great. Used vscode mainly for about a year and really liked it. Didn't have to do much to get it working for most languages!
But I started getting some back, shoulder and wrist issues around that time. Not because of vscode, but because of how I sat and used my keyboard and mouse.
So I totally changed my whole workflow and setup. Moved to vim (well neovim) and switched to a tiling window manager so I could reduce mouse usage.
I spent a lot of time tweaking my vim setup to get what I wanted for the different languages and tooling I need to use. It's made me much more productive for sure. Not really faster overall - coding is mainly thinking 😄 - just more comfortable in translating those thoughts to code than I was with any other setup before.
It's become kind of like a musical instrument 🤔 I don't have to think much about performing a certain action, my fingers just know and do it.
I prefer to use Vim. It is really lightweight for my old computer.
I never used VIM as a full-blown editor. Back when I started using Linux I would use it to modify config and text files or write shell scripts. Back in those days, I was only learning programming at a very basic level (I was young). I would use the Python IDE when I first started learning because I used Python. When I tried to learn C++ I was able to use Code::Blocks, which was relatively new at the time. I abandoned programming after that.
By the time I started development again, it was already 2016. I started with learning game development using Unity. This came bundled with MonoDevelop which I enjoyed using for a month or two before an online tutorial used Visual Studio and I switched. When I took up web development a few years after that, I just naturally fell into VSCode. I'm so used to all of the shortcuts and the commands that come wrapped in VSCode and that I have created. The idea of switching to anything else is almost exhausting.
I love VIM and saved my computers but when IDEs would chew up resources. But, I also love VSCode for the number of extensions, features, and constant improvements.
But in the end... Why not both? I used VSCode with the VIM extension so I can have keyboard shortcuts to fly around my code with the need for a mouse.
I do admit I don't use VIM to its full potential but I feel like it's not an all or nothing thing.
I use both. But every Dev should know how to use vim.
I use and like both, but for different purposes :-)