Hey vimers- vim was my first “programmer” editor and since then I went through various others (Xcode, JetBrains, Spacemacs, Emacs, VSCose). Now I’m thinking to circling back to vim, I think I still remember most commands :)

What’s a good way to get started? I see neovim is the way to go these days, and there’s a few Clojure related plugins already. Any other tips for modern vim development?

FWIW I prefer GUIs to the terminal, looks like there’s a few neovim guis available.

I use neovim with conjure - works really well.

(coupled with clojure-lsp)

There's a channel #conjure that may be helpful if you consider looking at it 🙂

What about non-Clojure stuff? I remember that 10 years ago I had a nice .vimrc file for fuzzy finders etc. What’s the consensus these days for quality of life plugins?

(I backed neovim when it was announced thinking it will probably fail but it was a nice moonshot - glad to see it going strong!)

there are tonnes of modern plugins - like fzf for fuzzy searching, others include vim-clap, vim-which-key, vim-sandwich etc...

I use vim petty much as my go-to editor, for nearly everything. When I have to use Kotlin/Java, I jump into IntelliJ

before install any plugin I recommend to try the vanilla way. There are a lot of articles about it: https://vimways.org/

one of my favorite: https://vimways.org/2018/death-by-a-thousand-files/

i use vim for everything, even including stuff like java where i've noticed that people tend to use IDEs i've found the experience of writing java in vim with LSP integration is surprisingly good

even before i started integrating LSP into my vim setup, i had a reasonably good experience just editing java code ("blindly") in vim and running the project from the command line (via gradle, mvn, etc., or even just java) after i make changes

What @dave said. All of it. 👍 For me there was more C# than Java, though.

i occasionally write C# at work, and i do it in vim 🙂

without LSP integration, unfortunately, because the version of mono we use is so old, the LSP server doesn't support it 😑

Ha! Ditto. Luckily that's many years past for me 🙂

When I say I use vim for "everything"/"most things", it means that I have a keyboard shortcut to pop up nvim in a new terminal, setup for Markdown editing, so that I can write longer Slack messages (or emails) too.

ooh, i like that idea

i have a vims (mnemonic: "vim scratch") shell alias that opens vim editing a file with a name like /tmp/scratch-20200806090055.adoc, or a different extension if i provide one, e.g. vims clj for a scratch clj file

a keyboard shortcut is the next level 😄

Ok so neovim with Conjure works nicely. What do I gain with Clojure-lsp? Haven’t looked closely yet.

things like completion, autocomplete, jumping to different definitions

fwiw, I don't use any LSP but I've heard very good things, I think it can complement other tools really well (as @dharrigan is pointing out!). Neovim 0.5+ will have a built in LSP client too! So you won't need to install CoC etc (although I guess there will be tradeoffs)

completion and linting are the main things i get out of clojure-lsp

I am sort of a neanderthal - I like the facilities of the repl itself. I use the very good :terminal provided by neovim, plus neoterm which provides simple commands for sending a region to one of the terminals (eg. the current form). It doesn't automatically change to the namespace I'm in, but gives me the direct repl experience (actual log of things I ran and printouts, etc.)

I use fzf for finding files in other people's projects, in my own projects my namespace layout is sane so I don't need it :D

I use :grep with ag as my grepprg

then the standard :cope to browse and jump to results, C-I / C-O to go forward and back through recent jumps

and :tabe to keep groups of buffers organized

finally q: to browse recent : commands as an editable buffer isntead of the crappy : mode keybindings

@noisesmith I've been considering something similar recently. Things like jump to definition would be my big miss, but I experimented with having my repl handle that a little while ago.

clojure.repl/source is right there of course (as well as to find the specific object that contains your function)

user=> (require '[ :as io])
nil
user=> (io/resource "clojure/core.clj")
#object[java.net.URL 0x74e81ce0 "jar:file:/home/justin/.m2/repository/org/clojure/clojure/1.10.1/clojure-1.10.1.jar!/clojure/core.clj"]
user=>

I might even write a little helper that turns "jar:file:/home/justin/.m2/repository/org/clojure/clojure/1.10.1/clojure-1.10.1.jar!/clojure/core.clj" into a path nvim can open

I'm sure that's something fireplace, conjure, etc. all have implemented already

I tried that and ran into a vim bug. If you search the github issue tracker for my name it's my only one.

in my neovim :e /home/justin/.m2/repository/org/clojure/clojure/1.10.1.jar works as expected, and from there I can open clojure/core.clj as a second step

Right. You can do it in two steps. I think you can't put it on the path is what I'm thinking of.

I was trying to setup all the stuff for gf etc to work out of the box.

oh, right, it would be nice if this was one op if you do it frequently

It's become a core part of my workflow to jump and tweak. Couldn't imagine having it be a 3+ step process

my hot take (see the convo in #off-topic for way too much detail) is that a dev flow where I need to jump around that much is a sign of a design problem / failure to encapsulate properly