Im considering spending some serious time learning one of the above. Two principle engineers I work with exclusively use them, and watching them work is incredible, the speed they move and get things done is pure wizadry. Can anyone learn this skill? For what it’s worth, the alternative is learning VScode. I’ve exclusive used Android Studio in my career.

  • Just to help you differentiate: vim is a text editor with a huge ecosystem of plugins and its own “language” where you can make the vim program into a sophisticated IDE. Vim also has very clever key bindings to help you interact with text more efficiently. My advice is that keyboard navigation using vim key bindings are worth learning, not necessarily sinking time to creating an IDE in vim for yourself with plugins.

    vim key bindings make it incredibly easy and efficient to manipulate text, after putting effort into learning it. Most text editors, IDEs, Note taking apps (Joplin, Obsidian, etc.) have VIM mode where you can interact with text same way as in vim. Hell, I wish Word had vim key bindings!

    To make VIM useful as an IDE you have to spend time to find plugins you need/want, customizing, tweaking, troubleshooting, etc etc.

    personally, in my professional software eng career, I don’t have time to troubleshoot VIM plugins or customize my setup and I need an env that is frictionless and basically pay others to maintain it and make improvements. I use IntelliJ IDEs and VS code with vim binding enabled.

    I do hobby around with it in my free time, making tweaks here and there but it is a huge time sink. Also, my squishy brain cannot always take the overhead of keyboard navigating an IDE. On days I am mentally drained of chasing evasive bugs, having a GUI that where i can click through menus without having to invoke a command really helps with mental fatigue.

    I would suggest enabling vim keyboard navigation and getting the hang of that first while still using android studio so you don’t lose all your IDE features. Looks like your editor has a vim plugin. Then, if you like navigating with a keyboard, you can slowly build your own IDE using plugins and switch over.