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  1. Stackups
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  4. Text Editor
  5. Emacs vs TextMate vs Vim

Emacs vs TextMate vs Vim

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

TextMate
TextMate
Stacks121
Followers118
Votes56
Vim
Vim
Stacks27.9K
Followers22.8K
Votes2.4K
Emacs
Emacs
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes322

Emacs vs TextMate vs Vim: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In this Markdown document, we will explore the key differences between Emacs, TextMate, and Vim.

1. **Customizability**: Emacs is highly customizable with a steep learning curve, allowing users to have extensive control over the software. TextMate offers a more user-friendly interface without extensive customization options like Emacs. Vim, known for its efficiency, has a model-driven design that allows for extensive customization through scripts, plugins, and configuration settings.

2. **Modes and Keybindings**: Emacs heavily relies on modes for different tasks such as editing text, programming, and browsing files. TextMate uses bundles to provide different features and functionalities corresponding to the current context. Vim focuses on modes where users can seamlessly switch between insert, normal, and visual modes using powerful keybindings.

3. **Extensibility**: Emacs provides a powerful Lisp-based extension language that allows users to create custom functions and plugins within the editor. TextMate supports bundles and themes for extending functionality and customization. Vim offers a wide range of plugins and scripts that enhance its capabilities and provide additional features.

4. **User Interface**: Emacs has a text-based interface with a steep learning curve due to its extensive features and capabilities. TextMate offers a more graphical and user-friendly interface with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. Vim is known for its modal editing approach that optimizes keystrokes and efficiency, making it popular among power users.

5. **Cross-Platform Compatibility**: Emacs is compatible with various operating systems but requires additional configuration for full functionality. TextMate is primarily designed for macOS, limiting its availability on other platforms. Vim, being a terminal-based editor, is highly portable and can run efficiently on various operating systems without any major issues.

6. **Learning Curve**: Emacs has a steep learning curve due to its extensive customizability and feature-rich environment, requiring time and effort to master its functionalities. TextMate and Vim have relatively easier learning curves compared to Emacs, making them more accessible to new users while still offering powerful features and capabilities.

In Summary, the key differences between Emacs, TextMate, and Vim lie in their customizability, modes and keybindings, extensibility, user interface, cross-platform compatibility, and learning curve, providing users with a range of options based on their preferences and requirements.

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Advice on TextMate, Vim, Emacs

Walter
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
Rogério

Software Developer

Jan 9, 2021

Needs adviceonVisual Studio CodeVisual Studio CodeAtomAtomNode.jsNode.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

TextMate
TextMate
Vim
Vim
Emacs
Emacs

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.

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.

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.

Ability to Search and Replace in a Project;Auto-Indent for Common Actions Like Pasting Text;Auto-Pairing of Brackets and Other Characters;Clipboard History;Column Selections and Column Typing;Completion of Words from Current Document;CSS-like Selectors to Pinpoint the Scope of Actions and Settings;Declarative Language Grammars for Graceful Mixing and Hacking;Dynamic Outline for Working With Multiple Files;Expand Trigger Words to Code Blocks With Tab-able Placeholders;File Tabs when Working With Projects;Foldable Code Blocks;Function Pop-up for Quick Overview and Navigation;Plug-able Through Your Favorite Scripting Language;Recordable Macros With No Programming Required;Regular Expression Search and Replace (grep);Run Shell Commands from Within a Document;Support for Darcs, Perforce, SVK, and Subversion;Support for More Than 50 Languages;Switch Between Files in Projects With a Minimum of Key Strokes;Themable Syntax Highlight Colors;Visual Bookmarks to Jump Between Places in a File;Works As External Editor for (s)ftp Programs;Works Together With Xcode and Can Build Xcode Projects
Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode
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.
Statistics
Stacks
121
Stacks
27.9K
Stacks
1.3K
Followers
118
Followers
22.8K
Followers
1.2K
Votes
56
Votes
2.4K
Votes
322
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 17
    Syntax highlighting
  • 5
    PHP Developer
  • 5
    Javascript
  • 4
    jQuery developer
  • 4
    Native UI
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
  • 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

What are some alternatives to TextMate, Vim, Emacs?

Sublime Text

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

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.

Visual Studio Code

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++

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

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

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

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

gedit

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

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

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.

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