Bell curve of IQ debate: Vim purist vs JetBrains users on both ends

Description

The image is an IQ bell-curve meme: a blue normal-distribution chart ranges from 55 to 145 with percentage labels "0.1% 2% 14% 34% 34% 14% 2% 0.1%" beneath each segment. On the left tail, a small stick-figure topped with the JetBrains PC (PyCharm) logo says, "I just use whatever JetBrains makes." At the peak, the large green-and-silver Vim logo proclaims, "No! Vim is what real programmers use!" On the right tail, a robed figure with the JetBrains CL (CLion) logo repeats, "I just use whatever JetBrains makes." The meme pokes fun at long-running editor wars, implying both very novice and very advanced developers quietly choose JetBrains IDEs while the mid-IQ majority loudly champions Vim

Common Tags

EditorWars IDEsAndTextEditors DeveloperHumor CodingHumor Tooling TextEditorChoice

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Bell-curve enlightenment: juniors click “Install JetBrains,” mids spend quarters perfecting .vimrc, seniors just take the corporate JetBrains seat and race to untangle the 10-million-line monolith before Finance notices the AWS bill

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Bell-curve enlightenment: juniors click “Install JetBrains,” mids spend quarters perfecting .vimrc, seniors just take the corporate JetBrains seat and race to untangle the 10-million-line monolith before Finance notices the AWS bill
Anonymous

After 20 years in the industry, you realize the real 10x developers aren't the ones who can exit Vim on the first try - they're the ones who ship features while everyone else is still configuring their .vimrc for the perfect colorscheme that will finally make them productive
Anonymous

The real insight here is that after 20 years of configuring Vim plugins to replicate IDE features, you eventually realize JetBrains already solved the problem - and your .vimrc has become the legacy system you now maintain
Anonymous

The real 10x trick is letting IntelliJ burn the CPU indexing while you stop maintaining a distributed system called .vimrc
Anonymous

Senior truth: you either turn Vim into an IDE or JetBrains into Vim; the bell curve just measures how much you trust AST refactors over your macros
Anonymous

Vim peaks the curve because survivors self-select; JetBrains users are just the 14% who value features over forgetting :wq
@LionElJonson 3y

jetbrains sw is shit (as a Rider user) *refuses to elaborate* *leaves*
@VolodymyrMeInyk 3y

nice switch
@thisisluxion 3y

I genuinely cannot bring myself to use something different from neovim, it's engraved in my brain now
no name 3y

meme was sponsored by corporate gang
1. @L2CacheGay 3y
  
  Consider: piracy
  
  no name 3y
  
  i mean no one needs this even for free unless they are developing for enterprise
  
  @L2CacheGay 3y
  
  Speak for yourself lol
  
  Deleted Account 3y
  
  Yes daddy matt
@l7KiLL 3y

I mean, you can use MS Code if you don't have money for IDE, but why do u even try to use such software as *vim?
1. @rusiboonja 3y
  
  speed of development, lightweight
  
  @l7KiLL 3y
  
  How does Vim make development faster?
  
  @rusiboonja 3y
  
  Not leaving your hand from the keyboard, hotkeys, plugins, etc
  
  Deleted Account 3y
  
  JetBrains design their IDEs the same way. I can't even remember when i have to use mouse to so something in Intellij IDEA while coding.
  
  @asm3r 3y
  
  Handy editing, made for tree text with braces(for code), not for messaging/ms word doc writing
  
  @CcxCZ 3y
  
  When you learn all this you will never want to use anything else: https://vimhelp.org/index.txt.html 🥴 Honestly though: quick navigation, convenient macro system & dot (repeat last edit) are hella useful for large one-off edits that it's not worth making some kind of format transformer and/or when the existing refactoring tools do not cut it. To me Vim is more of a sysadmin and data wrangler editor than strictly a programming tool. It's also worth it if you routinely work with DSLs that don't have IDE support or even create new ones. I see it as a very broad and moderately efficient text editing tool, whereas IDEs have rudimentary editing capability and then few very narrow and very efficient refactoring and reformatting tools. So in your usual IDE as long you are doing exactly what you are provided tooling for it's smooth ride but anything outside that starts being painfully tedious. Conversely if you take a good general editor you can usually plug those refactoring and formatting tools straight in (especially since Language Server support exists) but you may find it not worth the effort to even look for them. So YMMV on how much of each you need. Historically Vim was considered not so good for high boilerplate languages such as Java where you often want to algorithmically infer code rathen than to write it. At some point few desperate souls even made Eclipse/Vim integration layer. But as far I know most of the problems with these went away after NeoVim and Vim 8 made waves and made it easy for other tools to call into Vim rather than vice versa. If you want to see the extent of the editing efficiency for complex tasks, look at the challenges at https://www.vimgolf.com/ where people compete in how few keystrokes they can do the required edits.
2. @gizlu 3y
  
  The thing I like in vim the most: - it is first class citizen of terminal, not the other way around - I can harmlessly open over 9999 independent instances and forget about them - it doesn't force any particural workflow and tooling (like buildsystem) on me - I have one editor for everything rather than one IDE per lang
  
  @SamsonovAnton 3y
  
  There are multilingual IDEs out there (I use KDevelop, by the way 😁).
@l7KiLL 3y

What's the point
1. @paul_thunder 3y
  
  Same as bodybuilding - pointless waste of time and resources. But impressive
  
  @l7KiLL 3y
  
  I dunno, if refactoring code that makes ur life easier like 10 times is pointless I'll just say "ok", IDE is not for you.
  
  @paul_thunder 3y
  
  I was talking about vim-like software
  
  @l7KiLL 3y
  
  Oh, sorry then, misunderstanding.
  
  @paul_thunder 3y
  
  👌 it's fine, I understand
@l7KiLL 3y

You can extract classes/interfaces by refactor feature, or just fields/vars. You have much of cleanup stuff, like remove unused imports and/or methods etc.
@paul_thunder 3y

It's pointless, because everything vim can do - modern IDE can do too
@paul_thunder 3y

If you have enough RAM 😁
1. @l7KiLL 3y
  
  Well, if you are not you probably can use something like MS Code, but I'm not sure is it even possible to develop modern app w\o some RAM capacity.
  
  @paul_thunder 3y
  
  Well.. anything in compare to vim will require lots of RAM. But for me 32gb of RAM is cheaper than wasting my time to adjust to vim or even MS Code. I don't think Ms Code is bad.. but it's still not worth it for me
@l7KiLL 3y

I mean almost every JS app dev server cost you 500MB+
1. @paul_thunder 3y
  
  Yeah. I'm developing for mobile, so native debugging tools require 3-5GB of RAM. Saving few GB using some ancient development tool does not seem the best way to improve performance.
@RichStallman 3y

Emacs
@Algoinde 3y

I'm never leaving Sublime
1. Deleted Account 3y
  
  Same Notepad or AkelPad for life
  
  Deleted Account 3y
  
  .
@r1gor 3y

vscode and jb production must have
@Vedqiibyol 3y

VS Code is free. leaves
1. @jor_ban 3y
  
  notepad is free
  
  Deleted Account 3y
  
  Exactly
  
  @kandiesky 3y
  
  Notepad is not actually free as you have to pay for Windows (or crack it) before using the application/binary
2. @paul_thunder 3y
  
  Asm is free. Leave now.
@Vedqiibyol 3y

Indeed, though I find it easier to use plugins/extensions with VS Code... x3 Although one good point, notepad doesn't need 200+MB of RAM, unlike VS Code......
@paul_thunder 3y

Stop using anything except asm
@paul_thunder 3y

You don't need higher level tools. Asm can do anything you need
1. @SamsonovAnton 3y
  
  Asm is not portable.
  
  @paul_thunder 3y
  
  Why not?) What is more portable than the closest to machine code language?
  
  @SamsonovAnton 3y
  
  How do you understand "portable" then? It usually means ability to compile the program for many CPU architectures and OS environments — machine code is nowhere near to this.
  
  @paul_thunder 3y
  
  Oh I see. You mean portable like universal. Like smth you can use on other platform. I'm sorry to tell this, but any language has to transform it's commands to machine code. The difference is who has to do this: you, or the script written by other people. So basically it all cones to machine code in the end. My point was: if you think higher level ide is bad, use the lowest level you can. The lowest is machine code. Use it. Why not? Some nerds think they are better kind of programmer's because they use lower level tools, but does it really? 🤔
  
  @SamsonovAnton 3y
  
  Do you still practice writing machine code directly (without using asm compiler) on punch cards? 😁
  
  @paul_thunder 3y
  
  That's my point - I do not and I believe almost nobody does that for production purposes
  
  @SamsonovAnton 3y
  
  Another big problem with asm, even when targeting a single platform, is that it's really hard to write highly optimized code by hand. (Which bothers very few programmers nowadays, though.)
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 3y
  
  Agree
  
  @paul_thunder 3y
  
  Yeah. Same with people using vim etc.. they think they are more productive, but using more capable tool does not mean being more productive. Usually using sharper knife means get injured more often.. and that's it 😁
  
  @sylfn 3y
  
  I heard that most of accidental knife cuts are from NOT sharp knives becuase you need to add more force to it...
  
  @SamsonovAnton 3y
  
  No. I prefer non-sharpened knifes exactly because it's hard to impossible to cut your hands. I would better spend more time cutting than healing my fingers.
  
  @paul_thunder 3y
  
  Then use asm. It's hard to do smth harmful if your code does not compile
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 3y
  
  To be honest it doesn’t matter what tool you use. I use Visual Studio for almost everything and I don’t even use 99.99% of its features… So it clearly doesn’t benefit me by having those
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 3y
  
  (Unless you rely on some fancy sht like IntelliSense)
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 3y
  
  This is not the whole truth because many languages do not compile at build time but they get translated to machine code at runtime
  
  @Vedqiibyol 3y
  
  Well x86 and ARM are pretttty different.
2. @Vedqiibyol 3y
  
  True that, do I really need 6700 possible segfaults though? 🤔
@Vedqiibyol 3y

Yes precisely.
@paul_thunder 3y

Guys.. we all know what we are talking about. The good programmer is the lazy programmer. Do I have to explain this to anybody?
1. @SamsonovAnton 3y
  
  But not all lazy programmers are good. 😁
  
  @paul_thunder 3y
  
  You are definitely not
@WatashiWaSeireidesu 3y

Using Vim or Emacs is like being an edgy developer
@atom_ix 3y

I just use whatever Microsoft owns)
@Saeid025 3y

* Start using Helix
@Saeid025 3y

You won't regret it - Lightweight as vim (blazingly fast, do I have to say it's written in rust? 😂) - Smart as IDE (using LSP with easy setup (unlike vim), just install the LSP and leave the rest to helix) - Easier to understand and work with thanks to shortcuts that makes sense for non vim users (and having things like space mode) - ...
@Saeid025 3y

And if you're an GUI fan, give a shot to lapce... Still blazingly fast But be aware it's new and have a long road ahead of it But god damn it's fast compared to all other things
@CcxCZ 3y

*peeks into comments* War… war never changes.
@nohat01 3y

Clion on M1 Pro 14'
@nohat01 3y

I disable conditioning in my house
@nohat01 3y

Every night

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Bell curve of IQ debate: Vim purist vs JetBrains users on both ends

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