Atom vs Vim

Overview

Vim

Stacks27.9K

Followers22.8K

Votes2.4K

Atom

Stacks16.9K

Followers14.5K

Votes2.5K

GitHub Stars60.8K

Forks17.3K

Atom vs Vim: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown, we will discuss the key differences between Atom and Vim, two popular text editors used by developers.

User Interface and Customization Options: Atom offers a modern and intuitive user interface with a highly customizable layout. Users can easily modify themes, colors, and other visual aspects to fit their preferences. On the other hand, Vim has a more minimalist and efficient user interface, with a heavy emphasis on keyboard shortcuts. While Vim allows customization, it is typically done by editing configuration files, making it less user-friendly for beginners.
Plugins and Extensions: Atom has a vast library of plugins and extensions that enhance its functionality. These plugins can be easily installed and managed through the integrated package manager. Vim also supports plugins, but its plugin ecosystem is not as extensive as Atom's. However, Vim's built-in functionality, such as macros and the ability to run external commands, often compensates for the lack of specific plugins.
Learning Curve and Efficiency: Atom provides a more gentle learning curve for newcomers to programming and text editors. It offers a user-friendly interface and numerous features that can be easily discovered and used. On the other hand, Vim has a steep learning curve. It requires memorization of various keyboard commands and Vim-specific concepts, such as modes and registers. Once mastered, Vim's efficiency and speed are unparalleled due to its keybinding-centric design.
Availability and Portability: Atom is available for all major operating systems (Windows, macOS, and Linux), making it highly accessible to a wide range of users. Moreover, Atom's configuration and installed packages can be synchronized across devices using a GitHub account. Vim, on the other hand, is a terminal-based text editor that comes pre-installed on most Unix-based systems, making it highly portable and accessible without any additional installations.
Integration with other Tools and Languages: Atom offers seamless integration with various tools, languages, and development workflows. It provides support for numerous programming languages, syntax highlighting, and linting. Atom is also well-integrated with Git version control, making it effortless to manage repositories. Vim, although it lacks out-of-the-box language support, has an extensive ecosystem of plugins that enable integration with different languages, tools, and workflows. This allows users to customize Vim to fit their specific needs.
Community and Support: Atom has a large and active community of developers who contribute to its development and maintenance. The community provides support through forums, GitHub issues, and a rich documentation repository. Vim also has a strong and dedicated community, although it may be less beginner-friendly compared to Atom's community. Resources for Vim, such as tutorials, forums, and plugins, are abundant, enabling users to find assistance and solutions for their needs.

In Summary, Atom and Vim differ in terms of user interface, customization options, plugin support, learning curve, availability, integration with other tools, and community support.

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Advice on Vim, Atom

Walter

Jan 12, 2021

Review

Neovim can basically do everything Vim can with one major advantage - the number of contributors to the code base is just so much wider (Vim is ~100% maintained only by B. Mooleanaar). Whatever you learn for Neovim you can also apply to Vim and vice versa.
And of course there is the never ending Vim vs Emacs controversy - but better not get into that war.

162k views162k

Comments

Rogério

Software Developer

Jan 9, 2021

Needs adviceon

Visual Studio Code

Atom

Node.js

For a Visual Studio Code/Atom developer that works mostly with Node.js/TypeScript/Ruby/Golang and wants to get rid of graphic-text-editors-IDE-like at once, which one is worthy of investing time to pick up?

I'm a total n00b on the subject, but I've read good things about Neovim's Lua support, and I wonder what would be the VIM response/approach for it?

372k views372k

Comments

Andrey

Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers

May 18, 2020

Decided

Since communication with Github is not necessary, the Atom is less convenient in working with text and code. Sublim's support and understanding of projects is best for us. Notepad for us is a completely outdated solution with an unacceptable interface. We use a good theme for Sublim ayu-dark

539k views539k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Vim	Atom
Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.	At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.
Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode	Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies;Node.js integration;Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core;File system browser;Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files;Fast project-wide search and replace;Multiple cursors and selections;Multiple panes;Snippets;Code folding;A clean preferences UI;Import TextMate grammars and themes
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 60.8K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 17.3K
Stacks 27.9K	Stacks 16.9K
Followers 22.8K	Followers 14.5K
Votes 2.4K	Votes 2.5K
Pros & Cons
Pros 347 Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing) 328 Fast 312 Highly configurable 297 Less mouse dependence 247 Lightweight Cons 8 Ugly UI 5 Hard to learn	Pros 529 Free 449 Open source 343 Modular design 321 Hackable 316 Beautiful UI Cons 19 Slow with large files 7 Slow startup 2 Most of the time packages are hard to find. 1 Can be easily Modified 1 No longer maintained
Integrations
No integrations available	GitHub

What are some alternatives to Vim, Atom?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

Kakoune

Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones. Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode.

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Atom vs Vim: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown, we will discuss the key differences between Atom and Vim, two popular text editors used by developers.

User Interface and Customization Options: Atom offers a modern and intuitive user interface with a highly customizable layout. Users can easily modify themes, colors, and other visual aspects to fit their preferences. On the other hand, Vim has a more minimalist and efficient user interface, with a heavy emphasis on keyboard shortcuts. While Vim allows customization, it is typically done by editing configuration files, making it less user-friendly for beginners.
Plugins and Extensions: Atom has a vast library of plugins and extensions that enhance its functionality. These plugins can be easily installed and managed through the integrated package manager. Vim also supports plugins, but its plugin ecosystem is not as extensive as Atom's. However, Vim's built-in functionality, such as macros and the ability to run external commands, often compensates for the lack of specific plugins.
Learning Curve and Efficiency: Atom provides a more gentle learning curve for newcomers to programming and text editors. It offers a user-friendly interface and numerous features that can be easily discovered and used. On the other hand, Vim has a steep learning curve. It requires memorization of various keyboard commands and Vim-specific concepts, such as modes and registers. Once mastered, Vim's efficiency and speed are unparalleled due to its keybinding-centric design.
Availability and Portability: Atom is available for all major operating systems (Windows, macOS, and Linux), making it highly accessible to a wide range of users. Moreover, Atom's configuration and installed packages can be synchronized across devices using a GitHub account. Vim, on the other hand, is a terminal-based text editor that comes pre-installed on most Unix-based systems, making it highly portable and accessible without any additional installations.
Integration with other Tools and Languages: Atom offers seamless integration with various tools, languages, and development workflows. It provides support for numerous programming languages, syntax highlighting, and linting. Atom is also well-integrated with Git version control, making it effortless to manage repositories. Vim, although it lacks out-of-the-box language support, has an extensive ecosystem of plugins that enable integration with different languages, tools, and workflows. This allows users to customize Vim to fit their specific needs.
Community and Support: Atom has a large and active community of developers who contribute to its development and maintenance. The community provides support through forums, GitHub issues, and a rich documentation repository. Vim also has a strong and dedicated community, although it may be less beginner-friendly compared to Atom's community. Resources for Vim, such as tutorials, forums, and plugins, are abundant, enabling users to find assistance and solutions for their needs.

In Summary, Atom and Vim differ in terms of user interface, customization options, plugin support, learning curve, availability, integration with other tools, and community support.