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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. Neovim vs VSCode vs Vim

Neovim vs VSCode vs Vim

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Vim
Vim
Stacks27.9K
Followers22.8K
Votes2.4K
Neovim
Neovim
Stacks661
Followers760
Votes183
GitHub Stars94.0K
Forks6.4K

Neovim vs Vim: What are the differences?

Developers describe Neovim as "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. On the other hand, Vim is detailed as "Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing". 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.

Neovim and Vim belong to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Neovim are:

  • More powerful plugins
  • Better GUI architecture
  • First-class support for embedding

On the other hand, Vim provides the following key features:

  • Vertically Split Windows
  • Vimdiff
  • Folding

"Modern and more powerful Vim" is the top reason why over 23 developers like Neovim, while over 334 developers mention "Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing)" as the leading cause for choosing Vim.

Neovim is an open source tool with 32.4K GitHub stars and 2.35K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Neovim's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Vim has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1159 company stacks & 5671 developers stacks; compared to Neovim, which is listed in 13 company stacks and 132 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Vim
Vim
Neovim
Neovim

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.

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.

Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode
More powerful plugins;Better GUI architecture;First-class support for embedding
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
94.0K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
6.4K
Stacks
27.9K
Stacks
661
Followers
22.8K
Followers
760
Votes
2.4K
Votes
183
Pros & Cons
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
  • 31
    Modern and more powerful Vim
  • 27
    Fast
  • 22
    Asynchronous plugins
  • 20
    Stable
  • 18
    Edit text fast

What are some alternatives to Vim, Neovim?

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.

Emacs

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

Brackets

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

VSCodium

VSCodium

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

TextMate

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

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.

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