Neovim vs Spacemacs: What are the differences?
Neovim: Vim's rebirth for the 21st century. 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; Spacemacs: Emacs advanced Kit focused on Evil: The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs *and Vim!*. 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 belongs to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack, while Spacemacs can be primarily classified under "Tools for Text Editors".
Some of the features offered by Neovim are:
- More powerful plugins
- Better GUI architecture
- First-class support for embedding
On the other hand, Spacemacs provides the following key features:
- Batteries Included
- Nice UI
- Excellent ergonomics
"Modern and more powerful Vim" is the primary reason why developers consider Neovim over the competitors, whereas "Advanced support for Vim key bindings" was stated as the key factor in picking Spacemacs.
Neovim and Spacemacs are both open source tools. Neovim with 32K GitHub stars and 2.33K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Spacemacs with 18.1K GitHub stars and 4.45K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Neovim has a broader approval, being mentioned in 11 company stacks & 14 developers stacks; compared to Spacemacs, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 15 developer stacks.
