unix-as-ide VS LunarVim

> I've never understood why people and to extend vim to try to make it half of an IDE.

Because vim ships with on any *nix machine and provides a consistent experience no matter where you use it.

Vim is the DE part and people add plugins or whatever to enrich the text editing experience with LSPs or other language aware plugins, and the I in IDE is in the form of the integration with the tooling already available.

This[0] might shed some better light on the "why"

[0] https://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/

Check out “UNIX as an IDE”. First Google hit; https://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/ There are some great talks on YouTube but can’t be bothered to search :)

I use the CLI as my IDE. For me, that's FreeBSD or OpenBSD most of the time with a little bit of Linux (and as little Windows as possible). I usually wrap it all in a tmux session, but with vim/neovim offering :terminal functionality these days, I could see an alternate universe where that got flipped/inverted.

See Unix as IDE for an example.

I choose vim/neovim because I need a "just" code editor, and also it can be easily leverage my tools capabilities on UNIX way, and you can read more on this article Unix as an IDE, but the all-in-solutions, like an IDE, is not the right tool for code editing, it came with a lot of features and defaults that you in most cases I don't need it, or I have to learn how to use them according to that IDE.

Your teacher probably subscribes to the idea of Unix as an IDE, and I do too! It's important IMO to avoid holy wars, but there are some spectacular tools built into your Unix computer if you take the time to get to know them.

Vim is first and foremost a text-editor. In the Unix philosophy other tools should fill the places of the functionality a fully-fledged IDE gives you. You can add plugins and heavily craft your .vimrc to make it a lot like an IDE. But that's not really the "unix way" so to speak. I'm not necessarily some sort of coding elitist. I'll settle for other tools when I have to. I've also spent more hours than I care to admit making VIM more or less an IDE. But there is a sort of simplicity in being able to develop remotely in a test environment using vim and few other CLI tools. I recommend checking out Unix as and IDE for an intro to what I'm talking about.

Yes, this helped me https://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/

LunarVim

I would suggest to start getting into vim by first trying out popular vim keybinding plugins available on your favorite code editor and get used to those first. Then, if you want to dive deeper into the power of Neovim, try out popular configs like LazyVim, LunarVim, NvChad... Taking Neovim from a mere text editor to a full-featured IDE with features like intellisense, debugging, testing, etc... on your own takes quite a lot of work and configuration.

I used Helix for a while due to its support for LSP out-of-the-box, which my Vim config at the time couldn't live up to. I switched back to NeoVim after finding LunarVim[1] which had everything I was trying to get setup in my own config.

[1] https://www.lunarvim.org/

I'll admit I didn't look into it, but Helix sounds like something like LunarVim (https://www.lunarvim.org/)

Personally I much prefer that the editor NOT ship with something like that by default, especially when it's so easy to set up. I have several different vim config I use, including a pretty bare-bones one for headless systems, and I much prefer the ability to customize something very specifically.

Build tools that can compose together, rather than a single do-it-all tool. That is the power of the low level editors vs IDE's.

I can't comment on any implementation details, but at least with LunarVim (which I use for daily coding), a slowdown when interacting with LSP is very noticeable. Some others have attested to this on a GitHub issue.

I'm not doubting your experiences with the lack of a slowdown, but there is truth that others do experience it. That might be more of a problem with LunarVim itself rather than Vim, but how likely am I (as someone who would like to avoid what he calls "config hell") or other newcomers to avoid whatever pitfalls there are, if a distribution designed for ease of use by people who know better fall into them?

https://github.com/LunarVim/LunarVim/discussions/3359

Anyways, although i have not used them, LazyVim and LunarVim comes highly recommended. You can try these and see what suits you .