CotEditor vs Vim vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

Vim

Stacks27.9K

Followers22.8K

Votes2.4K

CotEditor

Stacks13

Followers24

Votes3

GitHub Stars7.3K

Forks465

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

CotEditor vs Vim vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Interface and Ease of Use: CotEditor offers a straightforward and clean interface that is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Vim, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve due to its reliance on keyboard shortcuts and commands. Visual Studio Code strikes a balance with a modern and intuitive interface that caters to both beginners and advanced users.
Customizability and Extensibility: Vim is highly customizable with a vast array of plugins and options for tailoring the editor to individual preferences. Visual Studio Code also provides a wide range of extensions and customization options, making it versatile for different programming needs. Compared to Vim, CotEditor offers less flexibility in terms of customization and extensibility.
Cross-Platform Availability: Visual Studio Code is available on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux, ensuring a consistent user experience across different operating systems. Vim is also cross-platform, making it accessible to users on various systems. CotEditor, however, is exclusively designed for macOS, limiting its use for users on different platforms.
Collaboration and Integration: Visual Studio Code has built-in support for collaborative coding through Live Share, enabling real-time collaboration and sharing of code with team members. Vim, though lacking in native collaboration features, can be integrated with external tools for collaborative work. CotEditor does not offer built-in collaboration features or extensive integration options.
Performance and Speed: Vim is renowned for its speed and performance, providing a lightweight and efficient editing experience, ideal for handling large files and complex codebases. Visual Studio Code offers a balance between performance and features, which may lead to occasional sluggishness on resource-intensive tasks. CotEditor, while efficient for common editing tasks, may not perform as well as Vim or Visual Studio Code for more demanding workloads.

In Summary, CotEditor, Vim, and Visual Studio Code differ in aspects such as interface, customizability, cross-platform availability, collaboration features, and performance, catering to different user preferences and requirements.

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Detailed Comparison

Vim	CotEditor	Visual Studio Code
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.	CotEditor is a lightweight plain-text editor for OS X.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode	Syntax Highlighting;Powerful Find & Replace;Setting via Click;Outline Menu;Split View;Character Inspector;Scriptable;Incompatible Characters;CJK Language Friendly	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 7.3K	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 465	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 27.9K	Stacks 13	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 22.8K	Followers 24	Followers 169.1K
Votes 2.4K	Votes 3	Votes 2.3K
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 3 Excellent support for Japanese encoding	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools

What are some alternatives to Vim, CotEditor, Visual Studio Code?

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.

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.

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.

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

CotEditor vs Vim vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Interface and Ease of Use: CotEditor offers a straightforward and clean interface that is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Vim, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve due to its reliance on keyboard shortcuts and commands. Visual Studio Code strikes a balance with a modern and intuitive interface that caters to both beginners and advanced users.
Customizability and Extensibility: Vim is highly customizable with a vast array of plugins and options for tailoring the editor to individual preferences. Visual Studio Code also provides a wide range of extensions and customization options, making it versatile for different programming needs. Compared to Vim, CotEditor offers less flexibility in terms of customization and extensibility.
Cross-Platform Availability: Visual Studio Code is available on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux, ensuring a consistent user experience across different operating systems. Vim is also cross-platform, making it accessible to users on various systems. CotEditor, however, is exclusively designed for macOS, limiting its use for users on different platforms.
Collaboration and Integration: Visual Studio Code has built-in support for collaborative coding through Live Share, enabling real-time collaboration and sharing of code with team members. Vim, though lacking in native collaboration features, can be integrated with external tools for collaborative work. CotEditor does not offer built-in collaboration features or extensive integration options.
Performance and Speed: Vim is renowned for its speed and performance, providing a lightweight and efficient editing experience, ideal for handling large files and complex codebases. Visual Studio Code offers a balance between performance and features, which may lead to occasional sluggishness on resource-intensive tasks. CotEditor, while efficient for common editing tasks, may not perform as well as Vim or Visual Studio Code for more demanding workloads.

CotEditor vs Vim vs Visual Studio Code

Overview