Technology
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Alternatively you can use and support a true community-driven editing environment dedicated to preserving your freedom, like vim/neovim or emacs.
You can also use Debian 1.1 but the makes zero fun as well.
Why make your own life hard for no reason. VIM is really really outdated when it comes to ease of use.
There is not a single thing where vim is better in any way. The argument that it is faster is the biggest lie ever.
Example: I write a few hundred lines of python code and execute it but sadly made formal mistakes. VIM does not help a bit. It might take hours of bugfixing with help of a command line.
Python addon and some others would have instantly found those mistakes saving myself a lot of headache.
That’s the same comparison as the senior developer and the normal dev. The dev might type twice as fast but making 5 times the mistakes he still needs a lot more time than the slow index finger typing senior.
Vscode is written in JavaScript and running in a web browser. Vim is written in C and runs at a console. Of course Vim is faster. Vscode is a hobbled cripple by comparison.
The rest of your comment suggests you are ignorant of vim with plugins and command line tools. I've tried vscode and while it looks nice, I am far faster when developing with vim and a couple of open terminals.
IDEs like VSCose are only powerful because they integrate coding tools like LSPs and completion enginea. Those tools are also available on neo/vim or Emacs, so you can be as proficient as you were with VSCode. Hell, even GitHub's Copilot is available on vim!
And frankly, having started coding on Atom before switching to neovim, I find a keyboard centric, mode-based coding much more efficient than a usual mouse-centric workflow.
It really boils down to personal preference, but I'm eager to find some objective arguments proving that "vim is outdated when it comes to ease of use", because that's not what I experienced.
This is incorrect. Vim and neovim can reach the same level of functionality as VS Code through plugins and extensive configuration. An experienced vim user with plugins is as fast as an experienced VS Code user with plugins.
Getting vim experience and customizing it has a much steeper initial investment. That’s where the disconnect is.
There is an argument to be made that completely mouseless development is faster. This also requires a steep initial investment to pan out.
What features are available in vim that aren't in vscode? Genuine question, trying to decide if I should make the switch
This is probably going to sound a bit silly, but legitimately the fact that it's installed on most Linux systems by default (and if not full blown
vim, thenvi- or rather,vim-tinyoften). VSCode has the Remote SSH extension, but the last time I checked it automatically installed the VSCode server (?) binary on the remote system. Often times I'm administrating systems that aren't mine, and do not want to leave random bits of VSCode onto it. Even if that weren't the case, its a lot easier for me to just open a file in vim since I'm already at a shell, rather than having to open VSCode, then wait for it to initialize (though it is quick!), activate Remote SSH and connect to the server which triggers the same initialization since it has to start the server-side component.Another probably silly sounding reason is that the keybinds are the same ones that you use in a lot of POSIX tools like
man,less/more, Firefox even uses/to activate quick-find (while you're not in a text field of course) though admittedly I believe that is the only one, hell even bash itself if you useset -o vi(by default its in Emacs mode - this is actually a feature of the readline library that bash uses as far as I understand).Though admittedly, those mostly are Linux/Remote Administration reasons and doesn't apply to everyone - but those were some of my initial motivations.
vim is not outdated, it was easy to use to begin with and could not be optimized any further. Yes, there are plugins/extensions/... to add more features, but on a basic install of vim you have everything you need to navigate source code and config files.