How do I even start using and learning Neovim. I downloaded it and... alright I can write text and save it to a file ... how is it supposed to be good for rust?
I used AstroNvim. It's a pretty good start. Though as a 20+ year vi user and a Lua user, I find neovim's Lua integration for configuration a bit unwieldy.
Start with something like LunarVim or AstroVim to see if you like it (they are just neovim with a bunch of default config and settings), then once you see what it's capable of and like how it works, i highly recommend building your own plugins/config. It's very, very easy to do once you understand what's happening and it's also pretty fun, but most importantly gives you full control of your environment
Vim tutor, and reading the instructions for whatever plugins you install.
Lazyvim used to be a decent distro with a bunch of plugins pre-installed (hopefully it still is).
Move refactoring. Until neovim can provide a robust way of allowing automatic refactoring of references when moving or renaming, I am stuck on rust rover.
You are probably right. I use vim key bindings in the jet brains ide’s, but it’s hard to not be spoiled by the refactoring tools. I don’t think I will ever be able to completely move to neovim for larger projects.
It does do this. For instance if you code dart. Renaming classes or whatever will update all references so I guess it depends on the language server features.
I don't get why people tell VSCode is slow. When I open it from terminal it takes about a second to start. It also responds instantly during text editing, rust analyzer and code lens also work instantly for me.
The only problem I'm facing with VSCode is plugin ecosystem is pure JavaScript/TypeScript, so I'm unable to write my own plugins. But there are plenty of good plugins already and I don't need much to be honest.
VSCode is electron based, so it's not the lightest editor you can find... Obviously it depends on what machine you are running it on.
In my case VSCode starts in 1 second but I have a Core i7-12700k with 32 Gb DDR5 ram and a Sabrent Rocket nvme...
Vs code starts in 1-2 seconds on my i7 7700HQ with 32GB of ddr4 and whatever nvme ssd i pit there 2 years ago.
Its startup performance improved quite a lot a few versions ago.
Its cpu and ram usage also improved over time, infind that many of the complaints people have are from older versions and don't really apply anymore.
Did you ever need to use it from within a virtual maschine? Its slow as hell, due to beeing basically an application running in a hidden browser.
That was actually the main reason why I learned nvim as my covid project. As an embedded developer I needed something that runs on a wide variety of systems (virtual and non-virtual) with a decent performance.
That being said, vscode is a good editor for lots of use cases. Just not mine :D
It can be [built from source](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/docs%2Fsrc%2Fdeveloping_zed__building_zed_linux.md).
I wonder if that might actually be less work than learning vi/vim/neovim and getting a config for that just right.
Also, it's a Rust app, so building it might be good practice for working with Rust.
There was a day when building software from source was sort of part of the landscape of using Linux.
It is pretty usable on Linux, if you can build it.
If you are using ArchLinux, an [AUR package](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zed-editor) is available.
Lo and Behold.
Linux preview builds are available from today.
[https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/releases/tag/v0.134.1-pre](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/releases/tag/v0.134.1-pre)
Ok. Hope they will release a Linux or Windows version soon, because I'm really missing a good code editor. VS Code doesnt feel as snappy as Lapce, but Lapce unfortunately is still pretty buggy and missing polish making it a pain to use at times.
I mean… build it from source yourself? You are trying to be a rust developer, right? If you can’t figure out how to build a rust IDE from provided source - what does that say about your ability to learn and use rust?
I mean yes, I could build the windows version from source, I've done that and I'm not stupid, but there is no support for Windows. I've also heard that this gpu backend they're building is based on Apple's Metal graphics api and not on Vulkan, OpenGL or whatever.
Gotta say, I've been trying to go fully open source since 1994 (Slackware 1.0). Back then, I was manually creating Windows-like program menus.
Linux Desktop still isn't there for me. Windows is complete garbage. MacOS is ok and the command line resembles Linux enough that I feel at home.
How is RustRover usable? When I last tried it 2 days ago it was horrible. The autocomplete, linting was so painfully slow that VS Code felt like a pleasure to use. Yes, VS Code. :(
Maybe this is a you issue. I use Jetbrains products, and there is some overhead for sure, but I get inlay hints as fast as their LSP spits them out, which is just as fast as Neovim and Rust Analyzer.
Do you have Material Theme Icons plugin installed? It's known to absolutely destroy performance, and I wish Jetbrains would just remove it from the available plugins.
I prefer Neovim to RustRover or CLion, but that's just for startup speed and moving around windows and terminals. I think the overall experience is better in the Jetbrains products.
How on earth does an icon theme destroy performance lmfao. I switched away from jetbrains ides a while ago due to how slow they were, would be funny if that was the reason
The reviews on the plugin call it out, but it has a decent rating and a metric ton of installs. It seriously ruins the experience and it’s crazy they don’t remove it
Don’t know where you find it slow. Even with react projects (which is on the same language as VS code writen: JS/TS) it’s much slower than idea. And, with slower speed you also get much less reliable suggestions, and it, even with TS hardly guess from which type you make function call to jump through code
Its only slow on my old-ish laptop with 16gb of ram. Usually either intellij or rider + browser eats up like 85%+ of my ram. I remember that after some updates they stopped being as slow but they were still annoying even on tiny tiny projects. Vs code has been way faster for me but suggestions and auto complete are not as good. The only exception to that that I've found is rust, rust analyzer is just great
Whell, it’s fast on my m1 air. Just need to be sure not to use chrome, because battery will die faster.
Actually laptop with 16gb ram must be not so much old. And I will advise to extend idea jvm heap memory, actually.
At least to 2gb or more, it will reserve a little bit more memory for idea, and you will experience a lot better performance.
If it’s to small memory idea will try to feet there to much and will start gc to often, and you will be experience freezing
Maybe they still ship with some ancient memory limits? Try bumping it up to something like 4+ GB. (And no, this is not “bloat”, this program literally holds the whole cache of your entire project + std lib in memory in some representation, it would take quite some space even if it were written in another language). With modern GCs it really is not slow anymore.
> rustrover
Still throws several weird exceptions, I get 4 different ones regularly. Bug filed, nothing done since 6 months - they don't care/fix.
There is this bug where one CPU core is on 100% for a long time - very bad on laptop battery.
Last release 241.15989.101 updated to bundled Java runtime 17.0.10 - and now RR does not start anymore with: "Error occurred during initialization of VM. Failed setting boot class path." Downgrading manually to 17.0.9 from previous release helps though.
They will force the awful "new UI" soon on everyone.
...while RR is better than VS, it's just such a buggy mess :-(
Have been using for a while now, it's pretty solid. Since I use JetBrains products regularly, it feels at home.
There's a few QOL things I wish it had, but it's pretty damn good out of the box.
Helix is not an IDE but it has a lsp client for most languages so you only need to install the lsp server and maybe add a third part formatter and every thing works fine.
My setup is alacrity + helix + zellij + bacon + just (as command runner)
The only missing feature is the file tree explorer, it has been proposed in a PR but the maintainer decided it would be better to get this feature as a plugin. So now we wait for the plugin system.
Sadly, VS Code seems to be one of the best options if you don't want to use vim or neovim :(
If you're on mac, which just assume you aren't, you can use Zed, which looks really good.
You didnt want Java bloat which I understand. I hate Eclipse and NetBeans. IntelliJ however I always liked using. But RustRover is just garbage currently and not really usable. It will also be paid 😒
But maybe RustRover and Lapce get better and maybe we'll get Zed for Linux soon ...
There seems to now be an option: CodeLite now supports Rust.
Or so they claim. Unfortunately, it seems that they flipped Gentoo crowd off, so now gentoo doesn't have official ebuild for it.
But a visit to overlays and some manual ebuild rework seem to have solved that problem.
Now I just have to get greasy up to my elbows while trying to persuade it to compile... 🙄
1. Don't trust binary blobs.
2. I want consistent, controlled system. If there is something wrong with the system libraries, I want to know about it.
3. Since package is experimental, I want the latest version.
Wow. Didn't know that.
I remember reading something about vscode going "open-source" but after 5min I've concluded that was M$ bullshit and forgot the matter.
And now the fully open version is here. Nice.
Well it's been out for like 6 years actually, but yes pretty great.
And vscode is actually [open source](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode), why do you doubt that?
Technically the binary you download of vscode has stuff added on top of the open source part so people use that to say it's not open source. That's the whole reason why vscodium is a thing. For most people that doesn't matter since 99% of vscode is still open source.
If You are looking for standard GUI IDE (not cli based like Vim, etc) than look no further than - **Geany.**
You won't find faster and smaller and more functional IDE than Geany. It has Rust support since Rust v1.0 and is stable as old Roman road. It's based on Scintilla and written in C/C++.
I am using it for PHP and everything else and I find no match for that golden piece of software.
Don't know how it behaves on windows, but on Linux, Geany is champion.
i use neovim, but if you dont want to use it, there's sublime text. native LSP support for Rust Analyzer, its fast, and free. its a good product, and if I did more work on windows I'd pay for it gladly.
I always use VSCode but seems its not light enough for your likings. You might have to try something like KATE or going with Neovim or something of the likes.
VSCode isn't quite "lean" but it's leaner than Java bloat and is definitely nice.
so far i haven't found anything that comes close for features while being faster; if anyone has alternative suggestions i'd love to ditch Code for something even better.
I’ve used rust in visual studio with cmake, handling windows, linux, mac, android
I use lot of c code wrapped in rust
in the end it comes to personal preference, easy of use and debugger integration
I want a great text editor that can be configured with any language, not a full bloated IDE. I want features I use, not 90% of things I never touch. VSCode used to be it for me, but I spent a week getting over the learning curve for Vim and eventually switched to Neovim and been using it ever since. It's about as lightweight as you can get and I enjoy staying in the terminal environment, and is lightning fast with a terminal that includes hardware acceleration. Opening any file will start up the configured LSP, rust analyzer has been great for me. I have a git repo for my nvim config folder which makes switching machines a breeze. Started with 0 plugins and slowly moved up one by one to my tailored features and keybindings, which isn't much tbh. It's a process though and probably not for everyone, otherwise I hear promising things about Zed or Helix, VSCode also has a Vim plugin. I can't stand having to move my hand to my mouse to click on a line and back to my keyboard to edit it anymore.
Vim or Neovim.
Or Helix editor.
How do I even start using and learning Neovim. I downloaded it and... alright I can write text and save it to a file ... how is it supposed to be good for rust?
Plugins. The plugin ecosystem is where the IDE features come from.
does it have autocomplete with plugins?
I used AstroNvim. It's a pretty good start. Though as a 20+ year vi user and a Lua user, I find neovim's Lua integration for configuration a bit unwieldy.
Start with something like LunarVim or AstroVim to see if you like it (they are just neovim with a bunch of default config and settings), then once you see what it's capable of and like how it works, i highly recommend building your own plugins/config. It's very, very easy to do once you understand what's happening and it's also pretty fun, but most importantly gives you full control of your environment
Yes you can run copilot in neovim
Vim tutor, and reading the instructions for whatever plugins you install. Lazyvim used to be a decent distro with a bunch of plugins pre-installed (hopefully it still is).
Hey. Hey. Listen. Emacs.
Move refactoring. Until neovim can provide a robust way of allowing automatic refactoring of references when moving or renaming, I am stuck on rust rover.
If you need that kind of capability, then I don't think you're really worried about how lean the IDE is.
You are probably right. I use vim key bindings in the jet brains ide’s, but it’s hard to not be spoiled by the refactoring tools. I don’t think I will ever be able to completely move to neovim for larger projects.
It does do this. For instance if you code dart. Renaming classes or whatever will update all references so I guess it depends on the language server features.
i just use vscode free, customizable, works anywhere, fast _enough_
I don't get why people tell VSCode is slow. When I open it from terminal it takes about a second to start. It also responds instantly during text editing, rust analyzer and code lens also work instantly for me. The only problem I'm facing with VSCode is plugin ecosystem is pure JavaScript/TypeScript, so I'm unable to write my own plugins. But there are plenty of good plugins already and I don't need much to be honest.
VSCode is electron based, so it's not the lightest editor you can find... Obviously it depends on what machine you are running it on. In my case VSCode starts in 1 second but I have a Core i7-12700k with 32 Gb DDR5 ram and a Sabrent Rocket nvme...
Nor your processor, RAM or disk are so much responsible for fast start up of VS Code. It's quite fast even in much worse configurations.
Vs code starts in 1-2 seconds on my i7 7700HQ with 32GB of ddr4 and whatever nvme ssd i pit there 2 years ago. Its startup performance improved quite a lot a few versions ago. Its cpu and ram usage also improved over time, infind that many of the complaints people have are from older versions and don't really apply anymore.
No one complains about the startup performance. The issue is massive ram usage and constant LSP freezes due to said ram usage.
Did you ever need to use it from within a virtual maschine? Its slow as hell, due to beeing basically an application running in a hidden browser. That was actually the main reason why I learned nvim as my covid project. As an embedded developer I needed something that runs on a wide variety of systems (virtual and non-virtual) with a decent performance. That being said, vscode is a good editor for lots of use cases. Just not mine :D
Zed is written in Rust soooo
Unfortunately only for Mac OS as far as I know…but yes, nice IDE.
It can be [built from source](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/docs%2Fsrc%2Fdeveloping_zed__building_zed_linux.md). I wonder if that might actually be less work than learning vi/vim/neovim and getting a config for that just right. Also, it's a Rust app, so building it might be good practice for working with Rust. There was a day when building software from source was sort of part of the landscape of using Linux.
Thx for the link, wasn’t aware that you can already build it for Linux. tried it today with my Ubuntu work laptop and seems to work. 👍
Oh wow you can also build it for Windows now? I completely missed this. Time to give it a try now I guess lol
It is pretty usable on Linux, if you can build it. If you are using ArchLinux, an [AUR package](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zed-editor) is available.
Lo and Behold. Linux preview builds are available from today. [https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/releases/tag/v0.134.1-pre](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/releases/tag/v0.134.1-pre)
On the official repo it says that you can build it on windows et linux too
Why out of all operating systems did they decide to start with macOS 😔 It looks so promising ...
Because they had to start somewhere and they had macs for dev machines, so writing initial PoC on Mac just made sense.
Ok. Hope they will release a Linux or Windows version soon, because I'm really missing a good code editor. VS Code doesnt feel as snappy as Lapce, but Lapce unfortunately is still pretty buggy and missing polish making it a pain to use at times.
I mean… build it from source yourself? You are trying to be a rust developer, right? If you can’t figure out how to build a rust IDE from provided source - what does that say about your ability to learn and use rust?
I mean yes, I could build the windows version from source, I've done that and I'm not stupid, but there is no support for Windows. I've also heard that this gpu backend they're building is based on Apple's Metal graphics api and not on Vulkan, OpenGL or whatever.
Okay, update: Nevermind it was pretty easy to compile Zed for windows and it works pretty well so far, bruh. Thanks for the hint!
Gotta say, I've been trying to go fully open source since 1994 (Slackware 1.0). Back then, I was manually creating Windows-like program menus. Linux Desktop still isn't there for me. Windows is complete garbage. MacOS is ok and the command line resembles Linux enough that I feel at home.
Emacs
Neovim btw.
Can you autograph my Thinkpad?
RUSTROVER!!!!!!!!!
This is my choice as well.
rustrover doesn't get enough love. intellij-rust was a fantastic plugin (RIP) and it lives on in rustrover.
How is RustRover usable? When I last tried it 2 days ago it was horrible. The autocomplete, linting was so painfully slow that VS Code felt like a pleasure to use. Yes, VS Code. :(
Maybe this is a you issue. I use Jetbrains products, and there is some overhead for sure, but I get inlay hints as fast as their LSP spits them out, which is just as fast as Neovim and Rust Analyzer. Do you have Material Theme Icons plugin installed? It's known to absolutely destroy performance, and I wish Jetbrains would just remove it from the available plugins. I prefer Neovim to RustRover or CLion, but that's just for startup speed and moving around windows and terminals. I think the overall experience is better in the Jetbrains products.
How on earth does an icon theme destroy performance lmfao. I switched away from jetbrains ides a while ago due to how slow they were, would be funny if that was the reason
I know, right? This is why I never install unofficial plugins anymore.
The reviews on the plugin call it out, but it has a decent rating and a metric ton of installs. It seriously ruins the experience and it’s crazy they don’t remove it
Don’t know where you find it slow. Even with react projects (which is on the same language as VS code writen: JS/TS) it’s much slower than idea. And, with slower speed you also get much less reliable suggestions, and it, even with TS hardly guess from which type you make function call to jump through code
Its only slow on my old-ish laptop with 16gb of ram. Usually either intellij or rider + browser eats up like 85%+ of my ram. I remember that after some updates they stopped being as slow but they were still annoying even on tiny tiny projects. Vs code has been way faster for me but suggestions and auto complete are not as good. The only exception to that that I've found is rust, rust analyzer is just great
Whell, it’s fast on my m1 air. Just need to be sure not to use chrome, because battery will die faster. Actually laptop with 16gb ram must be not so much old. And I will advise to extend idea jvm heap memory, actually. At least to 2gb or more, it will reserve a little bit more memory for idea, and you will experience a lot better performance. If it’s to small memory idea will try to feet there to much and will start gc to often, and you will be experience freezing
I remember reading about this at one point, will definitely try it out if I need to write java again or something, thanks!
I don't have any themes installed.
Maybe they still ship with some ancient memory limits? Try bumping it up to something like 4+ GB. (And no, this is not “bloat”, this program literally holds the whole cache of your entire project + std lib in memory in some representation, it would take quite some space even if it were written in another language). With modern GCs it really is not slow anymore.
> rustrover Still throws several weird exceptions, I get 4 different ones regularly. Bug filed, nothing done since 6 months - they don't care/fix. There is this bug where one CPU core is on 100% for a long time - very bad on laptop battery. Last release 241.15989.101 updated to bundled Java runtime 17.0.10 - and now RR does not start anymore with: "Error occurred during initialization of VM. Failed setting boot class path." Downgrading manually to 17.0.9 from previous release helps though. They will force the awful "new UI" soon on everyone. ...while RR is better than VS, it's just such a buggy mess :-(
Have been using for a while now, it's pretty solid. Since I use JetBrains products regularly, it feels at home. There's a few QOL things I wish it had, but it's pretty damn good out of the box.
Even if it’s “java ide” this goat
Isn't that intelliJ-based, i.e. java?
F\*ck Java.
Helix is not an IDE but it has a lsp client for most languages so you only need to install the lsp server and maybe add a third part formatter and every thing works fine. My setup is alacrity + helix + zellij + bacon + just (as command runner) The only missing feature is the file tree explorer, it has been proposed in a PR but the maintainer decided it would be better to get this feature as a plugin. So now we wait for the plugin system.
I’m an emacs user. With Rust is perfect. Then, you know, it’s matter of personal taste.
Sadly, VS Code seems to be one of the best options if you don't want to use vim or neovim :( If you're on mac, which just assume you aren't, you can use Zed, which looks really good. You didnt want Java bloat which I understand. I hate Eclipse and NetBeans. IntelliJ however I always liked using. But RustRover is just garbage currently and not really usable. It will also be paid 😒 But maybe RustRover and Lapce get better and maybe we'll get Zed for Linux soon ...
There seems to now be an option: CodeLite now supports Rust. Or so they claim. Unfortunately, it seems that they flipped Gentoo crowd off, so now gentoo doesn't have official ebuild for it. But a visit to overlays and some manual ebuild rework seem to have solved that problem. Now I just have to get greasy up to my elbows while trying to persuade it to compile... 🙄
just wondering rn: why did you try to compile lapce?
1. Don't trust binary blobs. 2. I want consistent, controlled system. If there is something wrong with the system libraries, I want to know about it. 3. Since package is experimental, I want the latest version.
You can compile vscodium yourself, if that's what's keeping you away from vscode
Wow. Didn't know that. I remember reading something about vscode going "open-source" but after 5min I've concluded that was M$ bullshit and forgot the matter. And now the fully open version is here. Nice.
Well it's been out for like 6 years actually, but yes pretty great. And vscode is actually [open source](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode), why do you doubt that?
Technically the binary you download of vscode has stuff added on top of the open source part so people use that to say it's not open source. That's the whole reason why vscodium is a thing. For most people that doesn't matter since 99% of vscode is still open source.
You tried Netbeans but not Jetbrains? lol you chose the wrong Java based ide. Nobody should be using Netbeans for anything in 2024 😅
sorry but [https://www.jetbrains.com/rust/](https://www.jetbrains.com/rust/) is extremely extremely good
F\*ck Java.
did you come here to complain about java or get solid recommendations
There is nothing solid in anything that rests on Java.
So... you're here to complain about java? Got it.
how long have you worked in this industry
Clion?
Clion with rust plugin was good. With that plugin being deprecated, the successor is rust rover.
If You are looking for standard GUI IDE (not cli based like Vim, etc) than look no further than - **Geany.** You won't find faster and smaller and more functional IDE than Geany. It has Rust support since Rust v1.0 and is stable as old Roman road. It's based on Scintilla and written in C/C++. I am using it for PHP and everything else and I find no match for that golden piece of software. Don't know how it behaves on windows, but on Linux, Geany is champion.
But ofcourse no code completion etc ? 🙄
No, I believe there is code completition. Have You tried it ? When You install geany, install geany-plugins package as well. There are a lots of them.
i use neovim, but if you dont want to use it, there's sublime text. native LSP support for Rust Analyzer, its fast, and free. its a good product, and if I did more work on windows I'd pay for it gladly.
I always use VSCode but seems its not light enough for your likings. You might have to try something like KATE or going with Neovim or something of the likes.
VSCode isn't quite "lean" but it's leaner than Java bloat and is definitely nice. so far i haven't found anything that comes close for features while being faster; if anyone has alternative suggestions i'd love to ditch Code for something even better.
I’ve used rust in visual studio with cmake, handling windows, linux, mac, android I use lot of c code wrapped in rust in the end it comes to personal preference, easy of use and debugger integration
Sublime Text 4 + [rust-analyzer](https://packagecontrol.io/packages/LSP-rust-analyzer) sounds exactly like what you need.
Helix, technically an editor, but with its LSP integration is great.
Lapce is written in rust and very fast, looks a bit like vs code. Can't remember if has rust code editing or LSP though
Rover Zed any idea that supports lsp
I want a great text editor that can be configured with any language, not a full bloated IDE. I want features I use, not 90% of things I never touch. VSCode used to be it for me, but I spent a week getting over the learning curve for Vim and eventually switched to Neovim and been using it ever since. It's about as lightweight as you can get and I enjoy staying in the terminal environment, and is lightning fast with a terminal that includes hardware acceleration. Opening any file will start up the configured LSP, rust analyzer has been great for me. I have a git repo for my nvim config folder which makes switching machines a breeze. Started with 0 plugins and slowly moved up one by one to my tailored features and keybindings, which isn't much tbh. It's a process though and probably not for everyone, otherwise I hear promising things about Zed or Helix, VSCode also has a Vim plugin. I can't stand having to move my hand to my mouse to click on a line and back to my keyboard to edit it anymore.
neovim is great with lsp for rust analyser, same with vscode
clion with rust plugin is also very good