Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Emacs

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.2K

+ 1

Votes322

TextMate

Stacks121

Followers117

+ 1

Votes56

Add tool

Emacs vs TextMate: What are the differences?

What is Emacs? The extensible self-documenting text editor. 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.

What is 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.

Emacs and TextMate can be categorized as "Text Editor" tools.

Some of the features offered by Emacs are:

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.

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

"Vast array of extensions" is the top reason why over 57 developers like Emacs, while over 16 developers mention "Syntax highlighting" as the leading cause for choosing TextMate.

According to the StackShare community, Emacs has a broader approval, being mentioned in 96 company stacks & 68 developers stacks; compared to TextMate, which is listed in 13 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.

Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.

Learn More

Pros of Emacs

Pros of TextMate

65
Vast array of extensions
44
Have all you can imagine
40
Everything i need in one place
39
Portability
32
Customer config
16
Your config works on any platform
13
Low memory consumption
11
Perfect for monsters
10
All life inside one program
8
Extendable, portable, fast - all at your fingertips
6
Enables extremely rapid keyboard-only navigation
5
Widely-used keybindings (e.g. by bash)
5
Extensible in Lisp
5
Runs everywhere important
4
FOSS Software
4
Powerful multilanguage IDE
4
Git integration
4
May be old but always reliable
3
Asynchronous
3
Powerful UI
1
Huge ecosystem

17
Syntax highlighting
5
Javascript
5
PHP Developer
4
Native UI
4
jQuery developer
3
Ruby
2
Bundles
2
Snippets
2
MacOS native
2
Commands
2
Low Energy Usage
2
Starts fast
2
Keyboard shortcuts
2
Open Source
2
Clean ui

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Emacs

Cons of TextMate

4
So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked
4
Hard to learn for beginners
1
Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux

Be the first to leave a con

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is 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.

What is 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.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Emacs?

What companies use TextMate?

See which teams inside your own company are using Emacs or TextMate.

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Emacs?

What tools integrate with TextMate?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

What are some alternatives to Emacs and TextMate?

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.

Eclipse

Standard Eclipse package suited for Java and plug-in development plus adding new plugins; already includes Git, Marketplace Client, source code and developer documentation. Click here to file a bug against Eclipse 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.

Spacemacs

Since version 0.101.0 and later Spacemacs totally abolishes the frontiers between Vim and Emacs. The user can now choose his/her preferred editing style and enjoy all the Spacemacs features. Even better, it is possible to dynamically switch between the two styles seamlessly which makes it possible for programmers with different styles to do seat pair programming using the same editor.

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.

See all alternatives

Emacs vs TextMate

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Pros of Emacs

Pros of TextMate

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Emacs

Cons of TextMate

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is Emacs?

What is TextMate?

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Emacs?

What companies use TextMate?

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Emacs?

What tools integrate with TextMate?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Related Comparisons

Trending Comparisons

Top Comparisons