Why use VIM/Nano/Emacs over VS Code?
Hey everyone!
I was just wondering why one would use any of the programs I mentioned above instead of VS Code to write Code.
Can someone give me a brief overview of the advantages?
Thanks in advance!
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They work in terminal. To me a more interesting question would be, why VSCode over PyCharm for Python for example.
Vscode with plugins works for many many languages good enough and the git integration is good. So if your job is like mine where you support many systems then having a common tooling is nice. Also you can setup containers with different configurations all ready for various projects.
Vim/neovim with plugins does exactly the same but uses less system resources. Lunarvim is a good place to start for a preconfigured neovim IDE.
Emacs will also be similar but I'm not as familiar with it.
There is also LazyVim which I personally am loving
But does actually work like an IDE? I for example love PyCharm understanding type annotation. Not only it highlights errors, but also improves autocompletion and makes big refactoring less scary.
The integration with data grip (unfortunately that's available in paid version) allows for similar behavior with SQL contained in strings. Which IMO fixes the impedance mismatch that created the need for query builders and ORM frameworks.
VS Code has some pretty good ide features for python, including understanding types, highlighting errors and warnings, linting, navigation features such as go to definition or go to references, and basic refactoring capabilities like rename symbol. These features are enabled by the python language server (pylance, in this case, which is Microsoft's proprietary one).
You can also get the same features in other editors that support the language server protocol. For example, I use neovim and my setup supports those same IDE features I used to use in VS Code for python.
1: ed/vi/vim is on every system with a shell, if you can ssh into it, you can edit files using those tools, it's worth knowing them.
Nano is adorable, and EMACS is notoriously huge, both in capabilities and learning curve.