TextMate vs Emacs

Overview

TextMate

Stacks121

Followers118

Votes56

Emacs

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.2K

Votes322

Emacs vs TextMate: What are the differences?

What is Emacs? The extensible self-documenting text editor. 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.

What is TextMate? The Missing Editor for Mac OS X. 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.

Emacs and TextMate can be categorized as "Text Editor" tools.

Some of the features offered by Emacs are:

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.

On the other hand, TextMate provides the following key features:

Ability to Search and Replace in a Project
Auto-Indent for Common Actions Like Pasting Text
Auto-Pairing of Brackets and Other Characters

"Vast array of extensions" is the top reason why over 57 developers like Emacs, while over 16 developers mention "Syntax highlighting" as the leading cause for choosing TextMate.

According to the StackShare community, Emacs has a broader approval, being mentioned in 96 company stacks & 68 developers stacks; compared to TextMate, which is listed in 13 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

TextMate	Emacs
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.	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.
Ability to Search and Replace in a Project;Auto-Indent for Common Actions Like Pasting Text;Auto-Pairing of Brackets and Other Characters;Clipboard History;Column Selections and Column Typing;Completion of Words from Current Document;CSS-like Selectors to Pinpoint the Scope of Actions and Settings;Declarative Language Grammars for Graceful Mixing and Hacking;Dynamic Outline for Working With Multiple Files;Expand Trigger Words to Code Blocks With Tab-able Placeholders;File Tabs when Working With Projects;Foldable Code Blocks;Function Pop-up for Quick Overview and Navigation;Plug-able Through Your Favorite Scripting Language;Recordable Macros With No Programming Required;Regular Expression Search and Replace (grep);Run Shell Commands from Within a Document;Support for Darcs, Perforce, SVK, and Subversion;Support for More Than 50 Languages;Switch Between Files in Projects With a Minimum of Key Strokes;Themable Syntax Highlight Colors;Visual Bookmarks to Jump Between Places in a File;Works As External Editor for (s)ftp Programs;Works Together With Xcode and Can Build Xcode Projects	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.
Statistics
Stacks 121	Stacks 1.3K
Followers 118	Followers 1.2K
Votes 56	Votes 322
Pros & Cons
Pros 17 Syntax highlighting 5 Javascript 5 PHP Developer 4 Native UI 4 jQuery developer	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 Hard to learn for beginners 4 So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked 1 Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux

What are some alternatives to TextMate, Emacs?

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

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 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

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.

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.

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.