I’m the kind of person who opens VSCode, and then a few minutes later realizes they’re editing files with Vim in the built-in terminal.
But I’m not completely stupid.
So over the past two years I decided to give in, accept which way the wind is blowing, and start using some kind of IDE. Because of its simplicity and its plugins, VSCode became my tool of choice. I’ve grown quite fond of it, especially the built-in terminal, where I can run commands and see how whatever I’m working on actually behaves.
And then I noticed that if I’m doing something and it turns out I need to change some tiny thing in one of the files, I’m better off just editing it right there with Vim, purely from muscle memory. Meanwhile I’m chuckling to myself like a preschooler, because muscle memory really does beat everything.
So much so that I usually install a plugin so command mode works in the editor window too, if I want it.
Anyway, I can brag about Vim here, but I’ll admit I’ve never used it as a real development environment. I was never interested in integrating everything into it; basically I just like using it for text editing. I don’t need code completion, filesystem browsing, or function search — thank you very much, I’ve always been happy to do those from the shell.
Though it’s a good question what will come of this in the future. Lately, since I mostly work with Claude in my job, my preferences have changed quite a bit, and it’s making my head spin.
More on that another time.