Atom vs Neovim vs Vim

Overview

Vim

Stacks27.9K

Followers22.8K

Votes2.4K

Atom

Stacks16.9K

Followers14.5K

Votes2.5K

GitHub Stars60.8K

Forks17.3K

Neovim

Stacks659

Followers760

Votes183

GitHub Stars94.0K

Forks6.4K

Atom vs Neovim vs Vim: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Key differences between Atom, Neovim, and Vim are outlined below:

1. **Architecture**: Atom is built on web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, while Neovim and Vim are terminal-based text editors. Neovim is a modernized Vim fork with added features for extensibility and usability.
2. **Performance**: Neovim is known for its improved performance compared to Vim, with faster startup times, reduced lag, and better handling of large files. Atom, being a graphical text editor, can sometimes be slower in performance compared to terminal-based editors like Neovim and Vim.
3. **Customization**: Neovim and Vim both have a rich ecosystem of plugins and configurations that allow users to customize virtually every aspect of their editing environment. Atom, on the other hand, is designed with a focus on ease of use out of the box and may not offer as extensive customization options as Neovim and Vim.
4. **Community and Support**: Vim has been around for much longer than Neovim and Atom, thus it has a larger community and extensive support available. Neovim, being a relatively newer project, has a growing community but may not have as many resources and plugins available as Vim. Atom has its own active community but may not have the same level of support as Vim and Neovim.
5. **Workflow**: Some users prefer the modal editing style of Vim and Neovim, where different modes allow for efficient text editing using keyboard shortcuts. Atom, being more GUI-focused, may have a different workflow that some users may find more intuitive. 
6. **Learning Curve**: Vim and Neovim have a steep learning curve due to their modal editing style and extensive customization options, which can be challenging for newcomers. Atom, with its more user-friendly interface, may have a gentler learning curve for beginners. 

In Summary, the key differences between Atom, Neovim, and Vim lie in their architecture, performance, customization options, community support, workflows, and learning curves. Each editor has unique strengths and caters to different preferences and needs of users.

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Advice on Vim, 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

Vim	Atom	Neovim
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.	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.
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	More powerful plugins;Better GUI architecture;First-class support for embedding
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 60.8K	GitHub Stars 94.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 17.3K	GitHub Forks 6.4K
Stacks 27.9K	Stacks 16.9K	Stacks 659
Followers 22.8K	Followers 14.5K	Followers 760
Votes 2.4K	Votes 2.5K	Votes 183
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 Cannot Run code with F5 1 No longer maintained	Pros 31 Modern and more powerful Vim 27 Fast 22 Asynchronous plugins 20 Stable 18 Edit text fast
Integrations
No integrations available	GitHub	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Vim, 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.

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.

Adobe Dreamweaver

It gives you faster, easier ways to design, code and publish websites and web applications that look amazing on any size screen. Create, code and manage dynamic websites easily with a smart, simplified coding engine. Access code hints to quickly learn and edit HTML, CSS and other web standards. And use visual aids to reduce errors and speed up site development.

Related Comparisons

Atom vs Neovim vs Vim: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Key differences between Atom, Neovim, and Vim are outlined below:

1. **Architecture**: Atom is built on web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, while Neovim and Vim are terminal-based text editors. Neovim is a modernized Vim fork with added features for extensibility and usability.
2. **Performance**: Neovim is known for its improved performance compared to Vim, with faster startup times, reduced lag, and better handling of large files. Atom, being a graphical text editor, can sometimes be slower in performance compared to terminal-based editors like Neovim and Vim.
3. **Customization**: Neovim and Vim both have a rich ecosystem of plugins and configurations that allow users to customize virtually every aspect of their editing environment. Atom, on the other hand, is designed with a focus on ease of use out of the box and may not offer as extensive customization options as Neovim and Vim.
4. **Community and Support**: Vim has been around for much longer than Neovim and Atom, thus it has a larger community and extensive support available. Neovim, being a relatively newer project, has a growing community but may not have as many resources and plugins available as Vim. Atom has its own active community but may not have the same level of support as Vim and Neovim.
5. **Workflow**: Some users prefer the modal editing style of Vim and Neovim, where different modes allow for efficient text editing using keyboard shortcuts. Atom, being more GUI-focused, may have a different workflow that some users may find more intuitive. 
6. **Learning Curve**: Vim and Neovim have a steep learning curve due to their modal editing style and extensive customization options, which can be challenging for newcomers. Atom, with its more user-friendly interface, may have a gentler learning curve for beginners. 

In Summary, the key differences between Atom, Neovim, and Vim lie in their architecture, performance, customization options, community support, workflows, and learning curves. Each editor has unique strengths and caters to different preferences and needs of users.

Atom vs Neovim vs Vim

Overview