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IDEs With VIM Text Editing Capability?
An anonymous reader writes "I am currently looking to move from text editing with vim to a full fledged IDE with gdb integration, integrated command line, etc. Extending VIM with these capabilities is a mortal sin, so I am looking for a linux based GUI IDE. I do not want to give up the efficient text editing capabilities of VIM though. How do I have my cake and eat it too?"
Netbeans with the Vi Vim for netbeans plugin.
Netbeans is FOSS, runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. It handles Java, C/C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy and does a bunch of other stuff.
There is the viPlugin for Eclipse as well - I just happen to like Netbeans better.
The ActiveState folks list VI key bindings as a feature for their Komodo and Komodo Edit products. These are closed source though Komodo Edit is free as in beer. It is cross platform - covering the win/lin/mac world.
I'm sure there are other options but those are the largest projects I know of that do what you want.
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Is there anything Emacs can't do? :-)
Carousel is a lie!
I think there's an app for that on the Emacs operating system.
Qt Creator has Vim bindings. It's possible to create non Qt applications messing with settings on the .pro file.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Could anyone explain the reason why simply extending vim is being ruled out? Why is it considered a "mortal sin"?
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
I know it's not out yet, but the katepart (the editor widget) already has a VI mode that supports most of the original commands and modal editing. Worth giving a try: the betas are getting better and better...
what about GVIM? (stupid answer)
Here are some VIM eclipse plugins:
http://vimplugin.org/
http://eclim.org/
Though I tend not to like these since the native plugins for whatever you might be developing inside eclipse tend to be more complete.
To blog is sublime
Sounds like you are ready for Emacs, son.
Umm vim supports plugins, and there is of course a GDB one.
Also there is an integrated command line called :! :%!whatever to replace it with output
or if you want to get more fancy you can open multiple buffers and
Vim easily integrates with the shell. You just have to know how to use both.
I'm not entirely sure of not extending vim but "not wanting to give up the efficient text editing capabilities of VIM" could mean.
Its, a IDE and will allow you to use vim as well.
Normally, I'm a vim+make guy, but I occasionally have to use Visual Studio. The ViEmu plugin was the best $99 I've ever spent on windows software. Doesn't embed vim, but it does support all of the vim extensions I use on a regular basis. It's actually pretty impressive how much of vi/vim they manage to implement - you quickly forget that you're not in the "real thing".
They also have plugins for Word,Outlook,etc but I don't use those programs so I haven't tried their plugins.
One minus: I don't think it works on the free version of VS (which I believe lacks plugin support in general) so this only applies if you have the full VS distro.
As a UNIX partisan, I can't recommend VS as your primary environment (so I guess I'm not answering the posters question, really) but if you're like me and just need a windows environment occasionally, I highly recommend checking it out.
I haven't tested it thoroughly, so I don't know how much of the VI command set it implements, but Komodo IDE has a 'vi' mode, and I believe it would fulfill your other requirements as well. (As a plus, it's fully cross platform, so you can use it everywhere)
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
Try Emacs.
Seriously. The integration with gdb, gcc, etc is where Emacs really shines. Yes, the Control-Meta-cokebottle commands are a bit annoying, but there's worthwhile tradeoffs there.
The first post was also quite useful. And to be fair, I like vim too.
I am officially gone from
Gvim is pretty good, it might still be too lean for what you are asking for, I would say it's more an intermediary step between vim and a big gui ide.
A lot of people use stuff like MiniBufExplorer or Taglist or Vim 7's built in OmniComplete. Everything an IDE can do, Vim itself can do a lot better.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
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when i get tired of typing i'll do a command line like
vi +100 program.c ; make; ./program arg1 arg2 etc
and then use command history (up arrow+return) to repeat it
it ends up being as fast as an IDE and it's much more flexible.
most importantly to me it works inside an ssh or telnet session with any old unix box.
Buy a copy of Visual Slick Edit for Linux.
Great piece of software. But yes, quite expensive cake. http://www.slickedit.com/
I'm currently working on switching away from my IDE to vim. There are plenty of plugins to put it on par with most IDEs, and honestly, a lot of the stuff in modern IDEs is just fluff. As for loading down Vim with all the extra stuff, I don't have the plugins autoload, but rather load after I run a script to transition it to my own "IDE Mode." This keeps Vim small and fast when I'm doing ordinary editing. I'm still in the transition phase, so I may not have seen all the disadvantages yet, but as far as I can see, the advantages outweigh them.
I'm also aware that Emacs does it quite well, but I'm more of a Vim user, so I'll stick with that unless I run into a wall and have to use Emacs in Viper Mode instead.
Mortal sin? First, get over your ridiculous predisposition against extending vim. Vim is built to be extended, and extending it can make it much more useful as a tool and not just an editor. If you're good enough in Vim to prefer it as a text editor, then make it comfortable as an environment. There are some amazing extensions for vim, that for me at least, make me much more productive than using an "IDE". Fuzzy file finder, exuberant ctags with taglist, minibufexplorer...
Extending VIM with these capabilities is a mortal sin
Then the worst sinners are the vim maintainers themselves. Even with just the default config, vim is full of IDE features.
Real men (still) use ed:
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.htm
You don't have to extend VIM yourself. What's wrong with using plugins? There are many interfaces for debuggers and other things on the VIM website. Extending with plugins might just be easier.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have been using this for years. Very nice plug in for Visual Studio. Note that you need the full version of Visual Studio, though, not the free-as-in-beer Express versions, as the Express versions don't support plug-ins.
intellij has a nice vim plugin that I have been using since 7.
Supports all of the modes, search / replace, etc.
The only thing I miss is the fancy window-editing, but that is more the fault of intellij than the plugin author.
pico!
I use Vim with a large variety of small speciality IDEs and find that most IDEs properly detect changes made outside them and reload the file. While I am running a debugger, I am not modifying code and use the built-in debugger interface. When I need to make a change, I just hit Alt-Tab, modify the file and save, and hit Alt-Tab and the files reloaded in the IDE.
I would be happy with just a project pane, like Textmate has, that doesn't look like ass. I love VIM, but that's pretty much the only thing holding me back from dropping Textmate.
The above is not worth reading.
If you're doing web work, primarily python, Wing IDE has great VIM support. It supports custom vim configurations and all of the good stuff. It has a free version, but I threw down some cash (d to get a sweet integrated debugger and test-running capabilities. I found it superior to both Netbeans and pydev on Eclipse, but both of those also support VIM text editing (with plugins). Basically, pretty much every decent python editor I've tried has supported vim either natively or via plugins.
KDevelop has a VIM mode for its text editor, I believe. Under Settings|Editor|Text Editor. Or at least it used to, a long time ago. You might need to install it as a separate package, or your distro might not package it (silly thing).
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KILL THE HERETIC !!
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Vim has so many IDE features (autocompletion, ctags, syntax), hundreds of plugins that let you customize your environment.. snippets, Doxygen, debugging, compiling.. I'll only suggest you one thing: better concentrate on improving your Vim environment than searching for any other tool that embeds it. Use Vim with GNU Screen after all, that'll give you true IDE experience.
Edit your files with VIM as per usual. Also keep them open in your GUI IDE of choice. Most IDEs detect file changes and will either ask you to reload the files or you can sometimes set options to automatically reload. Now you have the best of both worlds on top of the same source code files - you have all the features of each solution. Also set up your GUI IDE to launch VIM on a source file using a keystroke.
At least in 1.3, you can now use CMakefiles (which I use) or regular makefiles as well. The only downside is that it IS made for C/C++.
That said, it is by far my favorite IDE...made the switch from a simple text editor a year ago and haven't looked back...and that's after trying Eclipse....
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Gnu screen? It's for neckbearded, suspender wearing, curmudgeonly *nix grognards who still think that X is a fad and that it will never take off. They use screen to play nethack over telnet with vi keybindings for movement, run compiles, chat on IRC using irssi, IM using finch with jabber protocol only, twitter using ttytter, and browse the net with lynx.
Non-neckbearded non-grognards would just use mrxvt tabs, because frankly, it has gnu screen beat on ease of use hand down.
... use butterflies ! http://xkcd.com/378/
... I was kind of wondering why the hell terrorists needed VIM on an *IED*
Great piece of software. But yes, quite expensive cake. http://www.slickedit.com/
You aren't kidding. $300 for a code editor? What features could this thing have that could possibly be worth that much money?! I read some of the "cool features" like: code navigation, syntax completion, and auto-completions. There are lots of IDEs and editors that are free that have these very same features, so I am at a loss as to why anyone would choose to spend hundreds of dollars for this.
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if I want to change all of the X to - in an amino acid sequence line I type :s/X/\-/g
yea.. I'm sure that emacs can do it too.. But once all that brainpower is invested, theres no way I'd bother with emacs.. It's like a secretary changing to dvorak after she's hit 200wpm
vim is fast, powerful, user friendly, and quite picky about it's friends.
Storm
Non-neckbearded non-grognards would just use mrxvt tabs, because frankly, it has gnu screen beat on ease of use hand down.
First, there are multiple ways to get graphical "tabs". Second, tabs work best in limited-use scenarios (you'll quickly run out of real estate, for example). And third, screen has a good number of useful features not available to any implementation of tabs, including the ability to detach/re-attach, logging, monitoring, and split views.
There is the overhead of having to repeatedly type ^C-a (or ^C-SPACE, in my case), but that's hardly a problem if you've got real work to do.
For the record, I shave regularly and have never worn suspenders. ;-)
It seems to be little-known, but I discovered geany a few months ago and highly recommend it. (I do most of my programming with C and ncurses, and it's just absolutely ideal for what I want it to do.
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Gnu screen? It's for neckbearded, suspender wearing, curmudgeonly *nix grognards who still think that X is a fad and that it will never take off. They use screen to play nethack over telnet with vi keybindings for movement, run compiles, chat on IRC using irssi, IM using finch with jabber protocol only, twitter using ttytter, and browse the net with lynx.
Non-neckbearded non-grognards would just use mrxvt tabs, because frankly, it has gnu screen beat on ease of use hand down.
And none of them would ever have to connect remotely to a competently-managed server (meaning no X).
Tool.
Its vim emulation is not complete and consequently pretty annoying.
While you might have no problem hitting ctrl with your girly hands, us guys with big hands will have to move and twist our wrist in order to get down to ctrl, key, which is a fairly uncomfortable thing to do, and doing it lots of times every hour is going to kill my wrist - having big hands means escape is in a natural position for me while alt and ctrl are far away from my fingers.
It's probably yet another problem that can be traced back to Bill. I started seeing the mutant keyboards bundled with his "OS". The ctrl key, which gets used a lot, used to be where it could actually be reached, but that position defaults to the useless capslock key. Probably until 2003 or 2004, one of the first things for me to do on a new account with such a keyboard was to remap the position of the control keys.
I get too much pain in the wrists to try it your way, by contorting the wrists, to reach the out of the way locations. If I am sloppy I can crease my hand to get at the ctrl key but that quickly causes very sharp pains there too. I hadn't thought about it for a while, now that I have I see that I usually slide my fingers a row down from the home keys (typing home not 'HOME') and do it that way, transferring the pain to the elbows...
It's not so much a problem of what shapes the paint has on the damned keys but the problem that Linux distros now seem to follow the asinine, MBA-designed, One Microsoft Way of key mapping. Before all that stupidity there used to be a whole field called ergonomics and other fields and specialists streamlining tasks through time and motion studies. I bet I can get through a month, or longer, without hitting the capslock key on purpose.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Pida lets you embed vim as your editor. So you get all the goodness of an IDE with Vim as your editor. http://pida.co.uk/
If you just need debugging, try cgdb. It's very lightweight.
I am not a Linux guy, but I learned vi using Watcom C/C++ under Windows. Now that that tool has gone open source, it seems there is a Linux version. Will this work?
http://openwatcom.org/
If I'm off, my apologies...
Correction, Komodo Edit is open source - free as in speech - the full IDE contains proprietary extensions to it