Neovim vs PhpStorm

Overview

Neovim

Stacks661

Followers760

Votes183

GitHub Stars94.0K

Forks6.4K

PhpStorm

Stacks14.3K

Followers11.1K

Votes1.6K

Neovim vs PhpStorm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Neovim and PhpStorm are both popular tools used by developers for different tasks. Neovim is a highly extensible text editor built for manipulating text, while PhpStorm is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) specifically designed for PHP development. Despite their similarities in being coding tools, there are key differences between the two.

Platform Compatibility: Neovim is a cross-platform text editor that can run on different operating systems including Windows, macOS, Linux, and even Android. On the other hand, PhpStorm is primarily built for macOS, Windows, and Linux, providing a more specific environment for PHP developers.
Core Functionality: Neovim has a minimalist approach to its core functionality, focusing on providing a highly customizable text editing experience. It emphasizes on speed, efficiency, and minimal resource consumption. PhpStorm, being an IDE, offers a comprehensive set of features dedicated to PHP development. It includes features like code completion, debugging tools, and integration with version control systems.
Customizability: Neovim is renowned for its extensive customizability, allowing users to fine-tune every aspect of the editor's behavior to their liking. It supports plugins and scripting in multiple languages, opening up possibilities for users to create a personalized editing environment. PhpStorm, while providing some degree of customization, is more opinionated in its user interface and features. Its customization options are focused on adapting the IDE to fit different PHP development workflows.
Language Support: Neovim is a generalized text editor and supports editing multiple programming languages, including PHP, but it doesn't come with built-in support or specific features catered solely to PHP development. PhpStorm, on the other hand, is purpose-built for PHP development and offers dedicated features like PHP code analysis, refactoring tools, and framework-specific integrations, making it a more specialized choice for PHP developers.
Development Workflow: Neovim is known for its lightweight nature and terminal-based interface, making it suitable for developers who prefer a minimalistic and efficient workflow. It focuses on providing a powerful and distraction-free environment for editing text. PhpStorm, being an IDE, offers a more feature-rich interface with a graphical user interface (GUI) and integrated tools. It provides an all-in-one development environment with features like project management, code navigation, and collaborative capabilities.
Community and Support: Neovim benefits from an open-source community of contributors who actively develop and improve the editor. It has a dedicated user base that provides support, maintains plugins, and helps troubleshoot issues. PhpStorm, being a commercial product developed by JetBrains, offers professional support through documentation, forums, and official channels. It also benefits from the broader ecosystem of JetBrains IDEs, with shared features and plugins across different IDEs.

In summary, Neovim is a customizable cross-platform text editor that prioritizes speed and efficiency, suitable for developers looking for a lightweight editing experience. PhpStorm, on the other hand, is a specialized PHP development IDE with a comprehensive set of features tailored to PHP projects, providing a more integrated and feature-rich environment.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Neovim, PhpStorm

Johnny

Software Engineer at StackShare

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceon

Visual Studio Code

PhpStorm

WebStorm

When I switched to Visual Studio Code 12 months ago from PhpStorm I was in love, it was great. However after using VS Code for a year, I see myself switching back and forth between WebStorm and VS Code. The VS Code plugins are great however I notice Prettier, auto importing of components and linking to the definitions often break, and I have to restart VS Code multiple times a week and sometimes a day.

We use Ruby here so I do like that Visual Studio Code highlights that for me out of the box, with WebStorm I'd need to probably also install RubyMine and have 2 IDE's going at the same time.

Should I stick with Visual Studio Code, or switch to something else? #help

1.02M views1.02M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Neovim	PhpStorm
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.	PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.
More powerful plugins;Better GUI architecture;First-class support for embedding	Smart PHP Code Editor;Code Quality Analysis;Debugging and Testing;HTML/CSS/JavaScript Editor;Cross-platform Experience;Support for all major PHP frameworks;VCS; SQL Editor; Unit Testing;
Statistics
GitHub Stars 94.0K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 6.4K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 661	Stacks 14.3K
Followers 760	Followers 11.1K
Votes 183	Votes 1.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros 31 Modern and more powerful Vim 27 Fast 22 Asynchronous plugins 20 Stable 18 Edit text fast	Pros 287 Best ide for php 232 Easy to use 218 Functionality 166 Plugins 160 Code analysis Cons 14 Uses a lot of memory 10 Does not open large files 9 Slow 8 Uses Java machine 3 No way to change syntax highlight for files without ext
Integrations
No integrations available	Vagrant Google App Engine

What are some alternatives to Neovim, PhpStorm?

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.

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

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.

Related Comparisons

Neovim vs PhpStorm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Platform Compatibility: Neovim is a cross-platform text editor that can run on different operating systems including Windows, macOS, Linux, and even Android. On the other hand, PhpStorm is primarily built for macOS, Windows, and Linux, providing a more specific environment for PHP developers.
Core Functionality: Neovim has a minimalist approach to its core functionality, focusing on providing a highly customizable text editing experience. It emphasizes on speed, efficiency, and minimal resource consumption. PhpStorm, being an IDE, offers a comprehensive set of features dedicated to PHP development. It includes features like code completion, debugging tools, and integration with version control systems.
Customizability: Neovim is renowned for its extensive customizability, allowing users to fine-tune every aspect of the editor's behavior to their liking. It supports plugins and scripting in multiple languages, opening up possibilities for users to create a personalized editing environment. PhpStorm, while providing some degree of customization, is more opinionated in its user interface and features. Its customization options are focused on adapting the IDE to fit different PHP development workflows.
Language Support: Neovim is a generalized text editor and supports editing multiple programming languages, including PHP, but it doesn't come with built-in support or specific features catered solely to PHP development. PhpStorm, on the other hand, is purpose-built for PHP development and offers dedicated features like PHP code analysis, refactoring tools, and framework-specific integrations, making it a more specialized choice for PHP developers.
Development Workflow: Neovim is known for its lightweight nature and terminal-based interface, making it suitable for developers who prefer a minimalistic and efficient workflow. It focuses on providing a powerful and distraction-free environment for editing text. PhpStorm, being an IDE, offers a more feature-rich interface with a graphical user interface (GUI) and integrated tools. It provides an all-in-one development environment with features like project management, code navigation, and collaborative capabilities.
Community and Support: Neovim benefits from an open-source community of contributors who actively develop and improve the editor. It has a dedicated user base that provides support, maintains plugins, and helps troubleshoot issues. PhpStorm, being a commercial product developed by JetBrains, offers professional support through documentation, forums, and official channels. It also benefits from the broader ecosystem of JetBrains IDEs, with shared features and plugins across different IDEs.

Neovim vs PhpStorm

Overview