For me, VS Code is too buggy, at least for Go, and Jetbrains is too resource-heavy. There is new product of jetbrains, which is Fleet, but they require you to install Jetbrains Toolbox for it, which I don't want at all, and I don't feel that Fleet has an improved performance.
Now I'm back to using Neovim and couldn't be happier. What do you think is the future of IDEs and editors? Is there something new I'm missing out?
The majority of people are investing in tools that wont be around in 20 years time. Emacs and vim are likely safe, not so sure about the rest of them.
I learned vim in the nineties and still use it daily. I can play it like a piano.
There is simply no substitute for deep-trained muscle memory. I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc.
The risk, though, is that I have to protect this muscle memory like a precious investment. I actively avoid tooling that prevents me from using it, or will create a bunch of conflicting habits. I'm effectively married to vim, and, to be more specific, the extremely dialed-in neovim config I use.
Like a pianist. Because musicians aren't the only ones who need an HD realtime uplink to their minds.
I agonize over shortcut changes and consider long-term impact on typing speed, because typing speed -- like website loading speed -- is conceptual fidelity, and can make the difference between capturing an idea and losing it forever.
I'm always surprised that other engineers don't notice this, but then again, I didn't really notice it either, until I got severe carpal tunnel for a year or two back in the mid '10s.
Perhaps I was overly terse; I meant to do the opposite, with regard to the limited perspective represented in the previous comment!
> I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc.
Our strategies are very different, but it sounds like our experiences feel much the same. I don't really think about editing at all; my fingers just do what years of practice have trained them to do, while my conscious mind works on the actual problem.
I made my own quirky commitment to keyboarding speed: I learned to touch-type very young, using the Dvorak layout, and I've been cruising along at 100 wpm ever since. I have never learned QWERTY at all, so a normal keyboard cripples me - I become a slow, clumsy, two-fingered hunt-and-pecker, for whom getting any text into the machine represents a significant labor. (This is the primary reason I rejected vim, twenty-odd years ago - the Dvorak layout scrambled its command mode into anti-ergonomic chaos.)
In that way, I very much agree with your belief that typing speed matters! I have simply found it in a different layer of the stack.
I'm sure VSCodium could survive as an editor even if Microsoft got bored. There's certainly at least enough community support to port it to newer OSes and maintain stuff like OpenVSX
Computers today are about 20 times faster, and have 20 times more memory - and yet, all IDEs are clunky. VS6 on the common hardware of the time was ultra responsive.
I remember using it in 1998, with little memory on spinning rust. It was clunky as hell and very clueless. Big projects took ages to be built. Crashes were so frequent it was ridiculous.
I had been using it since 1998 on reasonable hardware. It was always reasonable for me.
What used to be the realm of the big chunky IDEs, intellisense/autocomplete, is now available to any editor big or small.
And even better, the lsp’s are maintained by the language teams themselves.
Wine yes, there’s 2 major players right now, there’s a lot of pieces about if you think you have a better approach.
I think VScode will have staying power for a very long time, because it’s built on arguably the most used language. And so the pool of programmers to hack it, extend it, fix and improve it is truly enormous.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol
"Erich Gamma: VS Code an Overnight Success… 10 years in the making"
Sometimes code in Go for backend dev. VSCode + a bunch of plugins work OK. Perhaps not super snappy like Sublime Editor, but still acceptable. BTW, I was a big Eclipse and Netbeans (for Java Swing) years ago.
Patently false: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
It’s a pity, because some of the other features seemed interesting, but not actually usable as an IDE.
Byte compilation has sped things up, tramp makes working with networked drives a breeze, magit makes git a breeze, LSP (language server mode) is improving interactivity with your code. Org-mode is an amazing markdown language and knowledge base, task manager, etc. The documentation is good for just about everything I come across. Integration with slack, mastodon, gemini, etc. Even the games and browsers are nice.
My friends that use vim seem to be comfortably moving along so I'm sure things are similar there.
We've never had it so good! There are multiple options, most of them are "free" and they'll all get the job done.
Each of them has their own particular quirks, but I wouldn't describe any of the mainstream offerings as "bad".
The only IDE I like more is Android studio. If it weren't for the dang Storage Access Framework getting in the way, it would probably be one of my very favorite dev experiences ever.
I don't know anything about Go, but I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode improves on that front.
The other editor I occasionally use is Nano, usually to edit config files via SSH.
As far as I know Eclipse and Netbeans are still around and updated but they're not breaking the news so I'm not sure about them.
As other said LSP are a big thing and even if they are mostly popular around VSCode and neovim's user they can be used with any other LSP compatible clients
I've tried Sublime Text but never used any of their features. I mean, the features are cool and all, but sometimes you don't need all that cruft. You just want to code, without being 'helped' along the way.
Vim and Emacs are for the hardcore. Many people swear by them, but I found them too barebones.
On an old laptop I had, with a low end dual core AMD processor, low-end SSD and 4 Gigs of RAM, vim with LSP plugin was the only editor I could use very well. [1]
On a new laptop, I don't have issues with intellij and vscode so far. I get more features than the old setup and that's nice.
[1] - Of course LSP itself may consume some memory and performance. clangd, gopls etc.. worked well for me though.
LSP has made it much easier to use something like Neovim instead of a big IDE without feeling like you're missing out on much.
JetBrains IDEs do everything I want them to do, and on my 16-core Ryzen with 64GB of RAM, they feel as fluid as touching water. I tried recording things in slow motion with my phone and I'm pretty confident that my keyboard to screen latency is <20 ms. Nvidia gpu, 144hz screen, Debian
That said, I did spend some time with their performance profiler after installing it and I generously increased IDE RAM limits.
We do have a monopoly, though. Pretty much everyone I know uses JetBrains CLion. But before that, everyone was on Visual Studio. So this effective monopoly has been around for 20 years, but we switched winners in between.
