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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. BBEdit vs Emacs

BBEdit vs Emacs

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Emacs
Emacs
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes322
BBEdit
BBEdit
Stacks36
Followers34
Votes5

BBEdit vs Emacs: What are the differences?

BBEdit vs Emacs

BBEdit and Emacs are popular text editors that offer various features and functionalities for developers and programmers. While both editors serve the purpose of editing and manipulating text, there are key differences that set them apart.

  1. Ease of Use: BBEdit is known for its user-friendly interface and intuitive design, making it easier for beginners to navigate and use. On the other hand, Emacs has a steeper learning curve and requires some time to master its extensive set of commands.

  2. Customization: Emacs is highly customizable, allowing users to tailor the editor to their specific needs. With its built-in scripting language, Emacs can be extended and customized extensively. BBEdit, although it offers some customization options, does not provide the same level of flexibility and extensibility as Emacs.

  3. Package Ecosystem: Emacs has a vast package ecosystem called Emacs Lisp Package Archive (ELPA), which provides a wide range of plugins and packages developed by its active community. This extensive selection of packages allows users to enhance Emacs with additional features and functionalities. BBEdit, while it does have a collection of plugins, does not have a comparable package ecosystem.

  4. Platform Compatibility: BBEdit is exclusively available for macOS, making it a popular choice for users within the Apple ecosystem. Emacs, on the other hand, is platform-independent and available on multiple operating systems, including macOS, Linux, and Windows.

  5. Integration with Other Tools: BBEdit integrates seamlessly with other macOS applications and tools, making it convenient for developers working within the Apple ecosystem. Emacs, with its extensive range of modes and features, can integrate with external tools for various programming languages and development workflows.

  6. Performance: BBEdit is known for its performance and stability, providing a smooth editing experience even with large files. Emacs, while highly powerful and feature-rich, may experience performance issues when handling extremely large files or complex tasks due to its extensive feature set and customization options.

In summary, while both BBEdit and Emacs serve as powerful text editors, they differ in terms of ease of use, customization options, package ecosystems, platform compatibility, integration capabilities, and performance. Users looking for a simpler and more beginner-friendly experience may lean towards BBEdit, while those seeking extensive customization and a vibrant community may prefer Emacs.

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Detailed Comparison

Emacs
Emacs
BBEdit
BBEdit

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.

It has been crafted to serve the needs of writers, Web authors and software developers, and provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of prose, source code, and textual data.

Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.;Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.;Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.;Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.;A large number of extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more. Many of these extensions are distributed with GNU Emacs others are available separately.
intelligent interface ; Integrate Smoothly Into Existing Workflows
Statistics
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
36
Followers
1.2K
Followers
34
Votes
322
Votes
5
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 65
    Vast array of extensions
  • 44
    Have all you can imagine
  • 40
    Everything i need in one place
  • 39
    Portability
  • 32
    Customer config
Cons
  • 4
    So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked
  • 4
    Hard to learn for beginners
  • 1
    Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux
Pros
  • 1
    Highly extensible (plugins, text filters, etc)
  • 1
    Superb regex find/replace
  • 1
    Flexible project file management
  • 1
    Support for character encodings and file formats
  • 1
    Snippets functionality includes substitutions
Integrations
No integrations available
Git
Git
macOS
macOS

What are some alternatives to Emacs, BBEdit?

Sublime Text

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.

Atom

Atom

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.

Vim

Vim

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.

Visual Studio Code

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++

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.

Brackets

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

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

VSCodium

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

TextMate

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

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

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