Atom vs Neovim

Overview

Atom

Stacks16.9K

Followers14.5K

Votes2.5K

GitHub Stars60.8K

Forks17.3K

Neovim

Stacks659

Followers760

Votes183

GitHub Stars94.0K

Forks6.4K

Atom vs Neovim: What are the differences?

What is Atom? A hackable text editor for the 21st Century. 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.

What is 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.

Atom and Neovim can be categorized as "Text Editor" tools.

Some of the features offered by Atom are:

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

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

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

"Free" is the primary reason why developers consider Atom over the competitors, whereas "Modern and more powerful Vim" was stated as the key factor in picking Neovim.

Atom and Neovim are both open source tools. It seems that Atom with 49.2K GitHub stars and 12.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Neovim with 32K GitHub stars and 2.33K GitHub forks.

Lyft, Typeform, and PedidosYa are some of the popular companies that use Atom, whereas Neovim is used by MAK IT, Finciero, and Focus21 Inc.. Atom has a broader approval, being mentioned in 836 company stacks & 725 developers stacks; compared to Neovim, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.

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Advice on Atom, Neovim

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

Atom	Neovim
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.	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.
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	More powerful plugins;Better GUI architecture;First-class support for embedding
Statistics
GitHub Stars 60.8K	GitHub Stars 94.0K
GitHub Forks 17.3K	GitHub Forks 6.4K
Stacks 16.9K	Stacks 659
Followers 14.5K	Followers 760
Votes 2.5K	Votes 183
Pros & Cons
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	Pros 31 Modern and more powerful Vim 27 Fast 22 Asynchronous plugins 20 Stable 18 Edit text fast
Integrations
GitHub	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Atom, Neovim?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Atom are:

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

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

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

"Free" is the primary reason why developers consider Atom over the competitors, whereas "Modern and more powerful Vim" was stated as the key factor in picking Neovim.

Atom vs Neovim