Switching from JetBrains IDEs to Vim

The JetBrains IDEs are the industry standard when it comes to writing code - and for very good reason. It's hard to deny that they're probably the best IDEs out there. An easy excuse to not try them out was their lack of semantic highlighting, but they eventually added that in 2017, so I had to give them a go. Of course, I was very impressed, and I continued to use them for a year or so ("them" being PHPStorm and PyCharm).

So, if I like them, why would I switch to something else? Firstly, I became annoyed by their ridiculous start-up time. Not only does it take a minute or so to go from launching the application to being able to open a project, it then takes even longer for the indexer to run and the IDE to become fully functional.

As well as this, there's obviously the licensing. I prefer to use free software wherever possible. While there is a "Community Version" of PyCharm, there is not an equivalent for ALL of their products. Not only this, but the community version of PyCharm is missing crucial parts of web development such as HTML and Sass colouring or Jinja support.

I've been using the IDEAVim plugin in all editors for a good while now, so I figured I'd dive all the way in and see if I can make Vim a proper replacement for PyCharm and PHPStorm. In this post I'll go over the plugins I use to get IDE-esque features out of plain Vim.

SemanticHighlight

There is no question - any editor I use HAS to have semantic highlighting. Since discovering it in KDevelop, and initially trying to turn it off, I now cannot live without it. Anyone reading this who hasn't experienced programming with semantic highlighting, I urge you to give it a try if your editor-of-choice supports it.

Luckily, there's a plugin for Vim which does it... quite well. It's not perfect, and despite having around 30 available colours, I still end up with a lot of repeats within the same function / class.

Editing normal text in Vim becomes interesting when using a semantic highlighting plugin. To alleviate this, I could only enable it in my language configuration files, but I decided I'd rather torture myself and have it on an exclude basis rather than include.

Relevant vimrc

cnoreabbrev sem SemanticHighlight
cnoreabbrev semr SemanticHighlightRevert


let g:semanticTermColors = [1, 3, 5, 6, 17, 30, 34, 54, 64, 88, 91, 98, 100, 107, 125, 129, 136, 142, 145, 148, 166, 170, 181, 202, 205]
let g:semanticGUIColors = ["#800000", "#808000", "#800080","#008080", "#00005f", "#008787", "#00af00", "#5f0087", "#5f8700", "#870000", "#8700af",
            \ "#875fd7", "#878700", "#87af5f", "#af005f", "#af00ff", "#af8700", "#afaf00", "#afafaf", "#afd700", "#d75f00", "#d75fd7",
                        \ "#d7afaf", "#ff5f00", "#ff5faf", "#ff6600", "#705598", "#6da741"]

autocmd! bufwritepost .vimrc source %
autocmd VimEnter *.md,*.rst,*.txt,*.html,*.jinja let b:dontsem=1

fun! MaybeSem()
    if exists('b:dontsem')
        return
    endif
    if &ft =~ 'markdown\|html\|text'
        return
    endif
    SemanticHighlight
endfun

autocmd VimEnter * call MaybeSem()
autocmd InsertLeave * call MaybeSem()

Ctrl-P

KDevelop's Quick Open feature is amazing, and JetBrains IDEs offer something similar which I don't know the name of off-hand. Pressing a shortcut (Ctrl-Q in my case) presents a list of files in the project, and they can be fuzzy-filtered and opened without taking hands off of the keyboard. Ctrl-P Vim offers this.

There is a tradeoff here though, instead of waiting 5 minutes for PyCharm to index on startup, Ctrl-P will index when you first invoke it, meaning if you do not open the file you want initially, you may have to wait ~30 seconds to search for it.

Also, it comes with a default limit of files to index, which I didn't realise until I got put on a Laravel Project created by someone with no respect for harddrive space, and wondered why I couldn't quick open a file which I knew existed.

Relevant vimrc

let g:ctrlp_map = '<C-q>'
let g:ctrlp_path_nolim=1
let g:ctrlp_path_sort=1
let g:ctrlp_max_files=0

Ack

I've mentioned ack in a previous post about Flask. Ack is somewhat like an alternative to grep. This allows me to do a "Find All" throughout a project in vim.

My .ackrc can be found here.

Relevant vimrc

map <C-f> :LAck! -Q ""<left>

ALE

ALE is the asynchronous linting engine for vim. I only have this enabled for python projects, and it's great at spotting silly mistakes before I bother trying to run the code.

On top of that, one of our projects requires running black over the code before checking it in. ALE can be used to run black quietly on every save and overwrite the file while it is open. Pretty neat.

Relevant vimrc

TODO: check if work laptop vimrc has different stuff

let g:ale_lint_on_insert_leave=1
let g:ale_fixers = ["black"]
let g:ale_fix_on_save=1

Airline

Not a critical part of my setup, but it nicely integrates with ALE to show existing errors and shows "tabs" of which files I have open.

Relevant vimrc

let g:airline#extensions#ale#enabled = 1
let g:airline#extensions#tabline#enabled = 1
let g:airline_theme='papercolor'

Other miscellaneous vimrc goodies

  • set showmatch - Shows matching brackets.
  • set smartcase - When searching, will be case insensitive unless you type a capital.
  • map <C-b> :buffers<CR> - Pressing Control + b shows which files I have open.
  • set listchars=tab:>.,trail:.,extends:#,nbsp:. - combine this with set list to show visible whitespace.
  • set tabstop=8 softtabstop=0 expandtab shiftwidth=4 smarttab - Tab key inserts 4 spaces.
  • set relativenumber - Relative line numbers, makes doing 4j and such easier.
  • set hidden - Allows you to switch buffer without saving first.

My vimrc

You can grab my vimrc from Github here if you so desire, though most of it is available here.

I use pathogen to manage plugins.

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