Question

…or is vi/vim only used when developing on a non-Windows OS?

If not, what feature(s) does vim provide that modern IDEs such as Eclipse do not? Why would one elect to use vim over Eclipse (or IntelliJ, Websphere, or other feature-rich IDEs) when developing on a Windows workstation? Note that I’m referring to Java development and to some degree compiled languages, not shell scripting or other forms of scripting.

Answer 1

Java is a ridiculously complicated language and I can’t think of a single person who has memorized all the method parameters and return types of even the builtin classes in the JDK. Being that Java is self-documenting via JavaDoc comments and turning those into manual pages to be paged through seems pointless when you have an IDE like Eclipse that will call up the specific documentation for a particular method or class.

In short, when you’re using (g)Vim, unless you’re using some heavy extensions, you’re flying blind most of the time and have most of the logic figured out in your head (or, you’re using screen(1) and have the man page opened on the other terminal).

I’m a big fan of Vim, but for larger, more library-heavy languages like Java, I wouldn’t use anything other than Eclipse. A friend of mine once conjectured that Java development was nearly impossible without an intelligent IDE and I agree.