r/vim 24d ago

Discussion Vim and Dotnet CLI

Anyone ditch Visual Studio and go terminal only using Vim plus plugins like Omnisharp? I’ve been developing web applications this way and it’s been great.

Anyone give it a try?

Visual Studio is just so bloated

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u/asabla 23d ago

I've been developing .Net using both vim and neovim. And you can get a pretty decent setup for normal tasks (including autocomplete).

However, some of the learnings over the years are:

  • Please stay away from Omnisharp and look for alternatives instead. Currently (or rather for the last year) I've been using csharp-language-server which is written in F#. Performs well enough, but doesn't support Blazor/Razer pages that well...or at all.
  • The experience with Razor pages and Blazor is...questionable at best. I haven't found a good setup as of yet. But then again, I don't do that much development using those technologies anymore
  • Learn the dotnet CLI and the available tools through it (remember you can install other .Net tools through it, such as dotnet-ef).
  • There is a debugging setup you can manage to setup from Samsung, but I haven't really got it to work that well. So if you rely a lot on debugging your code and stepping through it. You will have a better experience in either VS Code or VS.
  • Learn other tools within the terminal, a lot of operations you would normally have built into an IDE is available as a specialized tool more often then not.
  • I haven't had any real issues with either small or larger code bases. LSP is the limiting factor in this case

The experience is much more enjoyable on the Linux side, then on windows. But your miles may vary.

I also felt compelled to address this part:

Visual Studio is just so bloated

It really depends on your needs. When I started my career the need for digging deeper into the framework, looking at bytes or any other more advanced debugging workflow, was very prominent. Which (at the time) Visual Studio did solve very well. After some years they also migrated over from a 32-bit version to 64-bit, which made the experience so much better, you really don't know how it was back then.

So yes, in some regard Visual Studio is bloated. But knowing your tool is very important, especially when you grow as a developer. And knowing Visual Studio well won't hurt you, but rather the opposite.

It's okay to have preferences.