Emacs vs Neovim

Overview

Emacs

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.2K

Votes322

Neovim

Stacks659

Followers760

Votes183

GitHub Stars94.0K

Forks6.4K

Emacs vs Neovim: What are the differences?

Emacs and Neovim are powerful and extensible text editors known for their extensive customization and efficiency. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Customizability: One of the main differences between Emacs and Neovim is the approach to customization. Emacs has a powerful and well-established system that allows users to customize almost every aspect of the editor, from keybindings to completely changing its behavior. Neovim, on the other hand, focuses more on using plugins for customization, providing a simpler and more modular approach.
Performance: Neovim was developed with performance in mind, aiming to improve on some of the performance issues experienced with Emacs, especially when handling large files or running complex operations. Neovim's architecture and design decisions make it generally faster and more responsive compared to Emacs.
Modal Editing: Neovim is built around the concept of modal editing, where different modes (insert, normal, visual, etc.) are used for different tasks. This approach allows for more efficient editing, as it separates the act of typing text from the act of navigating and manipulating it. Emacs, on the other hand, primarily uses a traditional non-modal editing approach where the user can directly type and edit text.
Vim Compatibility: Neovim aims to be Vim-compatible, meaning that it tries to replicate most of the features and behaviors of Vim, a popular text editor known for its powerful modal editing capabilities. This compatibility makes Neovim a good choice for Vim users who want to take advantage of the benefits of a more modern and extensible editor. Emacs, while having some Vim emulation packages, does not strive to be fully Vim-compatible.
Extensibility: Both Emacs and Neovim are highly extensible, but they achieve it in different ways. Emacs provides a built-in Lisp interpreter that allows users to write custom functions and modify the editor's behavior directly. This results in a highly flexible and extensible system, but also requires a certain level of familiarity with Lisp. Neovim, being built on top of Vim, uses its plugin system, allowing users to extend the editor's functionality with a wide range of existing Vim plugins.
Community and Ecosystem: Emacs and Neovim have different communities and ecosystems supporting them. Emacs has a long history and a dedicated user base, with a rich set of packages and configurations available. It has been expanded upon and used for various purposes like writing code, scripting, and even as a complete operating system. Neovim, being a more recent project, has a growing community and ecosystem that focuses on modernizing the Vim experience, with an emphasis on performance and modularity.

In summary, Emacs excels in its all-encompassing ecosystem, while Neovim appeals to users looking for a streamlined, modernized version of the classic Vim editing experience.

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Advice on Emacs, 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

Detailed Comparison

Emacs	Neovim
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.	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.
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.	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 1.3K	Stacks 659
Followers 1.2K	Followers 760
Votes 322	Votes 183
Pros & Cons
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 So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked 4 Hard to learn for beginners 1 Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux	Pros 31 Modern and more powerful Vim 27 Fast 22 Asynchronous plugins 20 Stable 18 Edit text fast

What are some alternatives to Emacs, 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.

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.

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.

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Emacs vs Neovim: What are the differences?

Emacs and Neovim are powerful and extensible text editors known for their extensive customization and efficiency. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Customizability: One of the main differences between Emacs and Neovim is the approach to customization. Emacs has a powerful and well-established system that allows users to customize almost every aspect of the editor, from keybindings to completely changing its behavior. Neovim, on the other hand, focuses more on using plugins for customization, providing a simpler and more modular approach.
Performance: Neovim was developed with performance in mind, aiming to improve on some of the performance issues experienced with Emacs, especially when handling large files or running complex operations. Neovim's architecture and design decisions make it generally faster and more responsive compared to Emacs.
Modal Editing: Neovim is built around the concept of modal editing, where different modes (insert, normal, visual, etc.) are used for different tasks. This approach allows for more efficient editing, as it separates the act of typing text from the act of navigating and manipulating it. Emacs, on the other hand, primarily uses a traditional non-modal editing approach where the user can directly type and edit text.
Vim Compatibility: Neovim aims to be Vim-compatible, meaning that it tries to replicate most of the features and behaviors of Vim, a popular text editor known for its powerful modal editing capabilities. This compatibility makes Neovim a good choice for Vim users who want to take advantage of the benefits of a more modern and extensible editor. Emacs, while having some Vim emulation packages, does not strive to be fully Vim-compatible.
Extensibility: Both Emacs and Neovim are highly extensible, but they achieve it in different ways. Emacs provides a built-in Lisp interpreter that allows users to write custom functions and modify the editor's behavior directly. This results in a highly flexible and extensible system, but also requires a certain level of familiarity with Lisp. Neovim, being built on top of Vim, uses its plugin system, allowing users to extend the editor's functionality with a wide range of existing Vim plugins.
Community and Ecosystem: Emacs and Neovim have different communities and ecosystems supporting them. Emacs has a long history and a dedicated user base, with a rich set of packages and configurations available. It has been expanded upon and used for various purposes like writing code, scripting, and even as a complete operating system. Neovim, being a more recent project, has a growing community and ecosystem that focuses on modernizing the Vim experience, with an emphasis on performance and modularity.

In summary, Emacs excels in its all-encompassing ecosystem, while Neovim appeals to users looking for a streamlined, modernized version of the classic Vim editing experience.