Neovim vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

Sublime Text

Stacks33.8K

Followers27.8K

Votes4.0K

Neovim

Stacks659

Followers760

Votes183

GitHub Stars94.0K

Forks6.4K

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Neovim vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the world of text editors, Neovim, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code are prominent players, each offering unique features and functionalities suited to different coding needs.

Customizability: Neovim is known for its high level of customizability, allowing users to tweak every aspect of the editor through its configuration files. Sublime Text also offers a high degree of customization, with various packages and themes available to personalize the editor. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code comes with a wide range of built-in features and extensions, limiting the extent of customization compared to Neovim and Sublime Text.
Performance: Neovim is lauded for its speed and efficiency, with a focus on minimizing startup times and providing a seamless editing experience. Sublime Text is also known for its fast performance, prioritizing quick response times and smooth operation. Visual Studio Code, while feature-rich, can be a bit slower compared to Neovim and Sublime Text, especially when dealing with large codebases or intensive tasks.
Community Support: Neovim has a dedicated community of users and developers who actively contribute to its development and provide assistance through forums and online resources. Sublime Text also benefits from a strong community presence, with a wide range of plugins and resources created by users. Visual Studio Code, backed by Microsoft, has a vast community support network and frequent updates, making it a popular choice for many developers.
Cross-Platform Compatibility: Neovim, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code are all cross-platform editors, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. This ensures that developers can seamlessly switch between different platforms without compromising their workflow or editing experience.
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Features: Visual Studio Code stands out for its robust set of IDE features, including debugging tools, Git integration, and IntelliSense support for various programming languages. Neovim and Sublime Text, while offering some IDE-like features through plugins, may not provide the same level of integration and functionality out of the box as Visual Studio Code.
Licensing: Neovim is released under the GPLv3 license, promoting open-source principles and allowing users to modify and distribute the software freely. Sublime Text, while not open source, offers a free evaluation version with a paid license for continued use. Visual Studio Code is free to use and is released under the MIT License, making it a more permissive option for commercial and personal use.

In Summary, Neovim, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code each offer unique advantages in terms of customizability, performance, community support, cross-platform compatibility, IDE features, and licensing, catering to the diverse needs of developers in the coding landscape.

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CLI (Node.js)

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Advice on Sublime Text, Neovim, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M

Comments

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

Software Developer

Jan 9, 2021

Needs adviceon

Visual Studio Code

Atom

Node.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

Sublime Text	Neovim	Visual Studio Code
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.	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.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Goto Anything;Multiple Selections;Command Palette;Distraction Free Mode;Split Editing;Instant Project Switch;Plugin API;Customize Anything;Cross Platform	More powerful plugins;Better GUI architecture;First-class support for embedding	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 94.0K	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 6.4K	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 33.8K	Stacks 659	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 27.8K	Followers 760	Followers 169.1K
Votes 4.0K	Votes 183	Votes 2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 720 Lightweight 652 Plugins 641 Super fast 468 Great code editor 442 Cross platform Cons 8 Steep learning curve 7 Everything 4 Flexibility to move file 4 Doesn't act like a Mac app 4 Number of plugins doing the same thing	Pros 31 Modern and more powerful Vim 27 Fast 22 Asynchronous plugins 20 Stable 18 Edit text fast	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Linux macOS Windows	No integrations available	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Sublime Text, Neovim, Visual Studio Code?

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.

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.

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.

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

VSCodium

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

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.

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 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

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.

Related Comparisons

Neovim vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the world of text editors, Neovim, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code are prominent players, each offering unique features and functionalities suited to different coding needs.

Customizability: Neovim is known for its high level of customizability, allowing users to tweak every aspect of the editor through its configuration files. Sublime Text also offers a high degree of customization, with various packages and themes available to personalize the editor. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code comes with a wide range of built-in features and extensions, limiting the extent of customization compared to Neovim and Sublime Text.
Performance: Neovim is lauded for its speed and efficiency, with a focus on minimizing startup times and providing a seamless editing experience. Sublime Text is also known for its fast performance, prioritizing quick response times and smooth operation. Visual Studio Code, while feature-rich, can be a bit slower compared to Neovim and Sublime Text, especially when dealing with large codebases or intensive tasks.
Community Support: Neovim has a dedicated community of users and developers who actively contribute to its development and provide assistance through forums and online resources. Sublime Text also benefits from a strong community presence, with a wide range of plugins and resources created by users. Visual Studio Code, backed by Microsoft, has a vast community support network and frequent updates, making it a popular choice for many developers.
Cross-Platform Compatibility: Neovim, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code are all cross-platform editors, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. This ensures that developers can seamlessly switch between different platforms without compromising their workflow or editing experience.
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Features: Visual Studio Code stands out for its robust set of IDE features, including debugging tools, Git integration, and IntelliSense support for various programming languages. Neovim and Sublime Text, while offering some IDE-like features through plugins, may not provide the same level of integration and functionality out of the box as Visual Studio Code.
Licensing: Neovim is released under the GPLv3 license, promoting open-source principles and allowing users to modify and distribute the software freely. Sublime Text, while not open source, offers a free evaluation version with a paid license for continued use. Visual Studio Code is free to use and is released under the MIT License, making it a more permissive option for commercial and personal use.

Neovim vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

Neovim vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?