For a long-time Vim enthusiast who transitioned to (Doom) Emacs a few years back, the quest for the ideal Julia development environment has been an ongoing journey. Like many in the Julia community, I’ve observed the evolving landscape of code editors and IDE solutions, often finding myself wanting more from the available options. My personal experience, spanning from Julia v0.3 onwards, reflects a common sentiment: while there are promising tools, a truly seamless and robust experience can still feel elusive.
Having spent nearly three decades immersed in the world of Vim, my move to (Doom) Emacs (with evil-mode for Vim keybindings) was driven by the compelling features of org-mode. For larger projects, Emacs, in my view, offered a superior software foundation. Yet, when it comes to setting up a smooth and consistently functional Julia development environment within either Vim or Emacs, I’ve encountered persistent hurdles. Setups that initially seemed promising often broke down unexpectedly, sometimes without any discernible changes on my part. This recurring instability has led me to often revert to a more basic, yet reliable approach: keeping documentation and code side-by-side in separate windows.
In the realm of “out-of-the-box” functionality and feature richness, VSCode undeniably stands out as a strong contender for a Julia Code Comparer. My experiences with VSCode have been positive in terms of initial setup and the breadth of features offered. However, despite repeated attempts, I’ve struggled to fully integrate VSCode into my established workflow. This disconnect has kept me oscillating between (Doom) Emacs and Vim, even while acknowledging VSCode’s capabilities. Syntax highlighting across these editors generally performs well, and signature hints and docstrings are often displayed as expected. However, there are also times when these features inexplicably fail to appear, leaving me without clear reasons for these inconsistencies.
Over time, I’ve gradually relinquished the expectation of seamless IDE features within the Julia ecosystem, such as reliable refactoring, extract method, definition look-up, project-wide rename, and consistently usable tab-completion. For Julia, these functionalities have often proven to be less dependable compared to other languages in my experience.
A significant factor contributing to this situation, in my view, is the community-driven nature of Julia tooling. The desire to improve upon existing solutions is commendable, leading to the development of numerous custom implementations and plugins. However, the substantial undertaking of maintaining these tools often results in projects being abandoned due to time constraints and competing priorities. While the VSCode universe enjoys significant attention, solutions outside of it often face challenges in terms of sustained maintenance and continued functionality.
It’s crucial to emphasize that this is not a criticism of individual efforts. The developers contributing to Julia tooling have invested considerable time and energy, and their dedication is appreciated. The challenges highlight the inherent complexities of building and maintaining robust code comparison and development tools within a rapidly evolving language ecosystem like Julia.
