unix-as-ide VS nerdtree

> 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/

I personally use nerdtree. Add nerdtree-git-plugin too, that's nice when looking at your project (for files, use vim-gitgutter).

nerdtree is another very popular option

Using my toy js refactoring plugin and NERDTree.

2) Syntax check https://github.com/vim-syntastic/syntastic 3) File navigation https://github.com/preservim/nerdtree 4) Autocomplete There are many autocomplete extensions. I haven't found one that I feel comfortable to recommend. Another way is to create a txt file with all the key words and lines in the languages you use, make an autocommand that adds the txt file to the buffer, and then use ctrl-n or ctrl-p to autocomplete. You can also use ctrl-x-ctrl-l to autocmplete entire lines. 5) Running code Add commands in your .vmrc to run the current file as a a whatever file. I use :J to run java files, :P to run python files, :C to run c files and so on. For example, this is my command to run a java file: command J execute "!java %:t"

Plug 'https://github.com/preservim/nerdtree'

My basic vim workflow is that I open vim, which opens NerdTree for me by default. I can find the file I want in NerdTree, or I can hit Ctrl+p to open a file with fuzzy searching.

What's also useful is to have a tree plugin (such as nvim-tree or nerdtree), so you can just open any file in the workspace (or outside it) if needed. That way, even if you delete a buffer, you can just come back to a file whose buffer you deleted.

Worth noting Nerdtree’s repo is now at https://github.com/preservim/nerdtree and not at https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree