Overview

Vim

Stacks28.0K

Followers22.8K

Votes2.4K

Notepad++

Stacks20.5K

Followers16.8K

Votes421

Notepad++ vs Vim: What are the differences?

Notepad++ and Vim are popular text editors used for coding and writing. While both have similar functionalities, there are key differences between the two.

User Interface: Notepad++ provides a simple and user-friendly interface with menus, toolbars, and a tabbed view for multiple files. On the other hand, Vim has a command-line interface (CLI) and requires commands to navigate and perform actions, making it more suitable for experienced users.
Customization and Extensibility: Notepad++ offers a wide range of plugins and themes that can be easily installed and customized to enhance the editor's features and appearance. Vim, on the other hand, is highly customizable with its own scripting language and offers a vast collection of plugins and scripts created by the community.
Operating System Compatibility: Notepad++ is primarily designed for Windows and provides full support and compatibility for the Windows environment. In contrast, Vim is available for multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux, making it more versatile for users of different operating systems.
Editing and Navigation: Notepad++ provides a familiar editing experience with features like syntax highlighting, auto-completion, and code folding. However, Vim excels in editing efficiency with its modal editing, allowing users to perform complex edits using powerful commands and shortcuts. Additionally, Vim's navigation through files and searching capabilities using regular expressions are highly optimized.
Memory Usage and Performance: Notepad++ is known for its lightweight nature, consuming less system resources and providing fast startup times. Vim also has a small memory footprint but may have a slightly slower startup due to loading its extensive configuration files.
Learning Curve: Notepad++ is relatively easy to learn and use, suitable for beginners or those who prefer a graphical interface. Vim, on the other hand, has a steep learning curve, requiring users to learn commands and shortcuts to fully utilize its features and efficiency. However, once mastered, Vim can significantly speed up editing workflows.

In Summary, Notepad++ offers a user-friendly interface and customization options, while Vim provides powerful command-line editing, multi-platform support, and high extensibility.

🔥 Trending in Code Collaboration on StackShare

Glide

Code Collaboration

AI-assisted technical design docs

Try it View Docs Alternatives

Try

0

8

Advice on Vim, Notepad++

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

Andrey

Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers

May 18, 2020

Decided

Since communication with Github is not necessary, the Atom is less convenient in working with text and code. Sublim's support and understanding of projects is best for us. Notepad for us is a completely outdated solution with an unacceptable interface. We use a good theme for Sublim ayu-dark

539k views539k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Vim	Notepad++
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++ 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.
Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode	Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding;User Defined Syntax Highlighting and Folding: screenshot 1, screenshot 2, screenshot 3 and screenshot 4;PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) Search/Replace;GUI entirely customizable: minimalist, tab with close button, multi-line tab, vertical tab and vertical document list;Document Map;Auto-completion: Word completion, Function completion and Function parameters hint;Multi-Document (Tab interface);Multi-View;WYSIWYG (Printing);Zoom in and zoom out;Multi-Language environment supported;Bookmark;Macro recording and playback;Launch with different arguments
Statistics
Stacks 28.0K	Stacks 20.5K
Followers 22.8K	Followers 16.8K
Votes 2.4K	Votes 421
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 104 Syntax for all languages that i use 60 Tabbed ui 56 Great code editor 54 Fast and lightweight 38 Plugins Cons 3 No default plugin manager 2 Can't install more advanced packets

What are some alternatives to Vim, Notepad++?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.