I moved back to VIM again

by: Artur Dziedziczak

October 10, 2021

I decided to move to VIM as my default "IDE" for university projects. I used VS Code for around 5 years now and it was working great. I think now it’s the best editor in the world. Plugins work like charm, there is support for almost every language and it’s blazingly fast

Why then I moved to VIM again? I noticed that VS Code is going in a strange direction. Like a month ago I noticed that every time I opened it some strange login popup is shown. It’s not really described where it points. Then I noticed that there is some special integration with Github that allows you to log in via some token only when you use VS Code even though HTTP login is not possible now. This is only possible with Github…​

In general, I start to notice that Microsoft made VS Code free but as always free tools that come from corporations don’t respect your privacy

Lastly, OpenAI developed Copilot that is again closed source and it’s trained on code that is hosted on GitHub. I kind of feel like with this copilot OpenAI robbed programmers from their work. On Copilot webiste there is a quote

Training machine learning models on publicly available data is considered fair use across the machine learning community.

Which I agree with but making machine learning algorithms on publicly available data should be available for free. This whole field misses regulations and some companies clearly benefit from that

Other scary claims are:

If the technical preview is successful, our plan is to build a commercial version of GitHub Copilot in the future. We want to use the preview to learn how people use GitHub Copilot and what it takes to operate it at scale.

and

Not yet. For now, we’re focused on delivering the best experience in Visual Studio Code only.

Because of all of that, I decided to give VIM a try again. I configured COC, highlighter, linter, and custom mappings. Everything seems to work great even though I need this setup for PHP, JS, HTML, Elixir, Java, Bash, and Scala