Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn MorePros of Emacs
Pros of Vim
Pros of VimR
Pros of Emacs
- Vast array of extensions65
- Have all you can imagine44
- Everything i need in one place40
- Portability39
- Customer config32
- Your config works on any platform16
- Low memory consumption13
- Perfect for monsters11
- All life inside one program10
- Extendable, portable, fast - all at your fingertips8
- Enables extremely rapid keyboard-only navigation6
- Widely-used keybindings (e.g. by bash)5
- Extensible in Lisp5
- Runs everywhere important5
- FOSS Software4
- Powerful multilanguage IDE4
- Git integration4
- May be old but always reliable4
- Asynchronous3
- Powerful UI3
- Huge ecosystem1
Pros of Vim
- Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing)347
- Fast328
- Highly configurable312
- Less mouse dependence297
- Lightweight247
- Speed145
- Plugins100
- Hardcore97
- It's for pros82
- Vertically split windows65
- Open-source30
- Modal editing25
- No remembering shortcuts, instead "talks" to the editor22
- It stood the Test of Time21
- Unicode16
- VimPlugins13
- Everything is on the keyboard13
- Stick with terminal13
- Dotfiles12
- Flexible Indenting11
- Hands stay on the keyboard10
- Efficient and powerful10
- Programmable10
- Everywhere9
- Large number of Shortcuts9
- A chainsaw for text editing8
- Unmatched productivity8
- Developer speed7
- Super fast7
- Makes you a true bearded developer7
- Because its not Emacs7
- Modal editing changes everything7
- You cannot exit6
- Themes6
- EasyMotion5
- Most and most powerful plugins of any editor5
- Shell escapes and shell imports :!<command> and !!cmd5
- Intergrated into most editors5
- Shortcuts5
- Great on large text files5
- Habit5
- Plugin manager options. Vim-plug, Pathogen, etc5
- Intuitive, once mastered4
- Perfect command line editor4
- Not MicroSoft1
Pros of VimR
Be the first to leave a pro
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Emacs
Cons of Vim
Cons of VimR
Cons of Emacs
- So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked4
- Hard to learn for beginners4
- Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux1
Cons of Vim
- Ugly UI8
- Hard to learn5
Cons of VimR
Be the first to leave a con
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
- No public GitHub repository available -
- No public GitHub repository available -
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 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.
What is VimR?
Project VimR is an attempt to refine the Vim experience. The goal is to build an editor that uses Vim inside with many of the convenience GUI features similar to those present in modern editors for Mac.
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use Emacs?
What companies use Vim?
What companies use VimR?
What companies use VimR?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Emacs?
What tools integrate with Vim?
What tools integrate with VimR?
What tools integrate with Emacs?
What tools integrate with Vim?
What tools integrate with VimR?
No integrations found
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
What are some alternatives to Emacs, Vim, and VimR?
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.
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.
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.