I use NetBeans for development, and always feel like I'm slightly inferior for not relying on vim. There's certainly a lot to be said for it, but I really like (1) being able to zoom straight to the definition of one of my functions (can vim do this?), and (2) being able to code offline / on localhost sometimes.
And I think the second point is my problem with this. Chances are, if I get a cheapo PC or a tablet to code on, it's because I'm traveling. If I'm traveling, chances are I'm not going to have a reliable Internet connection. I've got a mobile hotspot, etc etc, but sometimes the simple method - working locally - is the best.
Tools are tools, and if you're using a hammer as a hammer it doesn't matter if it's a $12 hammer you got from your local hardware shop or if it's some exotic Estwing thing.
Sharpening your tools is an investment where you trade time now for power later. Vim is very much an instance of that trade-off. It's a ridiculously flexible power tool. If you are a machine at driving nails with a rusty hammer and you are happy, then there's no reason to stop doing it that way.But if the reason you don't use vim is that you're scared of it, it's not as bad as you think. You don't have to be superior to learn it, you just need a week and an open mind.
You need to run it once to initialize it. There is a way to set it up so it updates in real time as you change the files. However, I usually run it once for the entire repo after a major update. It takes less than 2 mins to build tags for a repository that is about 20gigs in size. It's fast and very efficient even if you use vim remotely over ssh. There are downsides of course and a bit of a learning curve, but once you get going, it's pretty effective.
1. You should know vi comfortably. When you get on a low space embedded system vi will usually be there: emacs is too space prodigal and forget any GUIs.
2. But vi isn't the best for iOS dev or J2EE and I recognize this. But my work is usually CLI or web, so this works for me.
3. Offline: REcently I've gotten an ubuntu running in dual boot...so ... keep your eye on my site, I may post soon.
VIM and NetBeans are two very different beasts. Netbeans is an Integrated Development Environment for Java (primarily) with excellent debugger, profiler and J2EE Serverin addition to all the code editing capabilities. If those functions are not important to your work, then go with vim/Emacs/Sublime Text 2 or whatever.
People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience. There are absolutely no absolutes!
> People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience.
Yes, you add the word "typically" in there, so it's not technically an absolute, but really, what you're saying is not much better.
I'm not going to tell you that you need to abandon your IDE, but I use a DDE centered around Vim, and I like to think that I don't necessarily have a narrow world-view as a result of that choice, thank you very much.
That's not a response to his point. His point is not that vim users have a narrow worldview.
His point is that people who claim that vim is the ultimate environment have a narrow worldview.
Reading a tiny bit into what he said, he's judging those who would see their editor of choice as the ultimate, i.e., as seeing those who don't use it as using an inferior tool.
Well I claim vim is the ultimate editor (as it is my preference and opinion), and at the same time I can say that: Not only do I prefer Visual Studio when working on dot net stuff, AND not only do I prefer Eclipse most of the time when working with JAVA while using GUI Linux... but they're both most definitely a better choice than Vim in both cases. Using vim in both cases would be using the inferior tool. So he's wrong on his generalization. Moving along...
Honestly, what is the damn point anyways? He made a completely useless comment based on a bs assumption that in all honestly sounds more like a person who just got frustrated and decided to go against the flow of the river. I find it very annoying. Specially since this discussion always seems to start because the other side starts making the same generalization over and over and over again. Now I'm more annoyed. Hah.
Rather than just making baseless assertions about people who favor vim or emacs, please mention an IDE with the same maturity, community, cross-platform support, cross-language support, and customizability as either vim or emacs.
To pick just one random alternative, let's take gedit. It looks simple and standard, which is nice. It's newer, that could be OK. It can be installed on more than one platform (though not necessarily simply). It has the major features, it's basically feature-complete. For fancier stuff and language-specific tools, you can write plugins with Python, which makes all kinds of things possible. On the other hand, it can get crashy when you use a few plugins - maturity issue. There are few plugins and fewer actively maintained because there's not a big community to support and build on it. A lot of its behavior is reasonable but not really customizable. Random example - if I personally want to have a simpler interface in the vein of scribes or WriteRoom, I'm SOL. Of course, gedit simply cannot be used from a terminal, so you will use another editor for that, with its own keybindings etc.
Most of the good editors have a story like this. Even if it seems to work great and be flexible enough, the community and plugins aren't there.
If your goal is only (say) to write C# for Windows, Visual Studio is probably best. If you only want to write Java, (say) IDEA is probably best. These are powerful environments. But only for certain things, and in a certain way. If you want to code on another platform, different language, really change the behavior, get around a bug, or get a fancy new capability without paying a vendor lots of money, you are just going to hit limits and have to pick up yet another tool.
If you've learned vim or emacs then you at least have a default which licks all these issues at once. In this sense they are "ultimate editors". And this is an opinion informed by broad usage of many editors.
I'm speaking from personal experience, so no it's not at all baseless. Furthermore, I don't need to satisfy your list of requirements. Those are your requirements.
I want my apps built with the best power-tool that was designed for the target platform. Your list of requirements didn't include that. So, for you maybe something like vim is the "ultimate editor", but for me it doesn't fulfill the primary requirement.
I don't think anyone's a bad person if they really like vim, but it just seems to me that people who think that usually just can't imagine why anyone would not make the same choice as them.
1) Baseless or not - your generalization is just as bad (or even worse) as the inverse case.
2) He didn't tell you his list of requirements just so you would change your mind about whatever your opinion is at the moment. He did it to explain why people say what the say so fanatically. As a matter of fact, those weren't even requirements per se.
3) Regarding the "best power-tool" comment. His list of "requirements" DID INCLUDE what you just talked about. There are better tools than vim + command-line in specific cases - according to the GP - and he gave you examples of his opinion on such IDEs. Visual Studio is pretty much THE exemplary case, though I supplement it with ViEmu as editing code in a way that's not modal or having to use the arrow keys seems completely foreign to me after years of indoctrination.
He made it clear that he believes that the people that go cookoo for vim + command-line or emacs are so adamant to call them the ultimate environments not only because they include/are better text editors than everything else in the market, but because they're expandable, mature, and portable. And let's not even get into the part that relates to working on a remote server through a terminal emulator.
If you get ONE thing out of both the GP and my response today - let it be this: you say that vim is not the "ultimate editor" for you because it doesn't fulfill the primary requirement (being a power tool according to you)... Well, I'm pretty sure the primary requirement of each and every competent hacker regarding editors and IDE's should be to make the edition and creation of text easy, fast, streamlined, and efficient. I can count the text editors that fulfill that requirement to the T in a hand. Hell, there's three (or four if you dislike being productive). And one of them doesn't have a term version.
4) There are a few very specific tools/toolsets for very specific tasks in the programming world that make more sense to use than the classic "hardcore" editors. Hell in some cases they aren't necessarily better, but are obligatory! Nevertheless it doesn't change the fact that having either vim or emacs as tools in your bat-belt, will indelibly make a more productive developer by a factor of a quattuordecillion and one internet kittens.
5) I'm going to go ahead and make a generalization just as you did. "People who claim that vim/emacs are not the ultimate environment typically have a very naive world-view in my experience. Oh and in 98.64656% of the time (cause internet statistics are just as bad as generalizations) such claims come from people that failed to achieve proficiency in the aforementioned editors."
Notwithstanding the foregoing, I don't think you're bad for disliking vim, and I can totally understand that personal preference, biases, opinions, and memories will dictate what editor you end up using. But pissing a bunch of geeks that love the editors in questions with a comment that sounds biggot-ish, elitist (as elitist as the people you're confronting), and egocentric, makes very little sense if you ask me.
I agree...eventually it's personal preference. Use whatever works for you. I gave up on vim multiple times before it finally started to make sense...now I use it on all my platforms and take my vimrc with me.
"People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience."
That's not what people "typically" claim.
People typically claim that the "text editor" part of NetBeans / Eclipse / IntelliJ IDEA / Visual C# / etc. do s*ck big monkey balls compared to vim / Emacs.
There are even people who go as far as writing client/server mode for IDEs allowing to "plugin" either vim/emacs inside your IDE or to call your IDE's feature from vim/emacs (cue eclim / emacs-eclim ).
That the "text editor" part of the big IDEs are totally inferior and utter crap compared to vim / emacs is not exactly something open up for debate ; )
And I think the second point is my problem with this. Chances are, if I get a cheapo PC or a tablet to code on, it's because I'm traveling. If I'm traveling, chances are I'm not going to have a reliable Internet connection. I've got a mobile hotspot, etc etc, but sometimes the simple method - working locally - is the best.