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  1. Stackups
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  4. Text Editor
  5. Neovim vs TextMate

Neovim vs TextMate

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

TextMate
TextMate
Stacks121
Followers118
Votes56
Neovim
Neovim
Stacks659
Followers760
Votes183
GitHub Stars94.0K
Forks6.4K

Neovim vs TextMate: What are the differences?

Neovim: Vim's rebirth for the 21st century. 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; 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.

Neovim and TextMate can be primarily classified as "Text Editor" tools.

Some of the features offered by Neovim are:

  • More powerful plugins
  • Better GUI architecture
  • First-class support for embedding

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

"Modern and more powerful Vim" is the top reason why over 23 developers like Neovim, while over 16 developers mention "Syntax highlighting" as the leading cause for choosing TextMate.

Neovim is an open source tool with 32K GitHub stars and 2.33K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Neovim's open source repository on GitHub.

MAK IT, Finciero, and Focus21 Inc. are some of the popular companies that use Neovim, whereas TextMate is used by MAK IT, Edify, and Rude Baguette. Neovim has a broader approval, being mentioned in 11 company stacks & 14 developers stacks; compared to TextMate, which is listed in 13 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.

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Advice on TextMate, Neovim

Walter
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
Rogério

Software Developer

Jan 9, 2021

Needs adviceonVisual Studio CodeVisual Studio CodeAtomAtomNode.jsNode.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

Detailed Comparison

TextMate
TextMate
Neovim
Neovim

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.

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.

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
More powerful plugins;Better GUI architecture;First-class support for embedding
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
94.0K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
6.4K
Stacks
121
Stacks
659
Followers
118
Followers
760
Votes
56
Votes
183
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 17
    Syntax highlighting
  • 5
    PHP Developer
  • 5
    Javascript
  • 4
    Native UI
  • 4
    jQuery developer
Pros
  • 31
    Modern and more powerful Vim
  • 27
    Fast
  • 22
    Asynchronous plugins
  • 20
    Stable
  • 18
    Edit text fast

What are some alternatives to TextMate, Neovim?

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.

Emacs

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

Brackets

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

VSCodium

VSCodium

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

gedit

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

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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