PhpStorm vs Vim

Overview

Vim

Stacks27.9K

Followers22.8K

Votes2.4K

PhpStorm

Stacks14.3K

Followers11.1K

Votes1.6K

PhpStorm vs Vim: What are the differences?

Introduction

PhpStorm and Vim are two popular code editors used by developers for their coding projects. Despite both being used for coding, there are key differences between the two that make each editor unique in its own way.

User Interface: PhpStorm provides a modern and visually appealing user interface with various features and shortcuts readily available, making it user-friendly for beginners. On the other hand, Vim has a simplistic and minimalistic interface that relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts, which can be intimidating for new users but highly efficient for experienced programmers.
Integration with other tools: PhpStorm comes bundled with various features like version control, debugging tools, and extensions, providing a comprehensive development environment in a single package. In contrast, Vim relies on external plugins and tools for additional functionality, allowing users to customize their setup to fit their specific needs.
Learning Curve: PhpStorm is more approachable for beginners due to its intuitive user interface and documentation, making it easier to get started with coding tasks. Vim, on the other hand, has a steep learning curve with its unique key bindings and modes, requiring time and effort to master but offering unmatched speed and efficiency once mastered.
Cross-Platform Compatibility: PhpStorm is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, providing a consistent coding experience across different operating systems. Vim, however, is a text editor that runs in the terminal and can be used on virtually any platform, making it lightweight and versatile for developers working on multiple systems.
Code Navigation: PhpStorm offers advanced code navigation features like code completion, refactoring tools, and intelligent search capabilities, streamlining the development process and improving productivity. Vim provides powerful navigation options through keyboard shortcuts and commands, allowing users to efficiently move around and edit code without the need for a mouse.
Cost and Licensing: PhpStorm is a commercial product that requires a paid license for full access to all features, while offering a free trial for users to test out the editor. Vim, on the other hand, is an open-source software distributed under a charityware license, allowing users to freely use, modify, and share the editor without any cost.

In Summary, PhpStorm and Vim differ in user interface, integration with other tools, learning curve, compatibility, code navigation capabilities, and cost and licensing.

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Advice on Vim, 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

Vim	PhpStorm
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.	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.
Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode	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
Stacks 27.9K	Stacks 14.3K
Followers 22.8K	Followers 11.1K
Votes 2.4K	Votes 1.6K
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 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 Vim, 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.

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.

Eclipse

Standard Eclipse package suited for Java and plug-in development plus adding new plugins; already includes Git, Marketplace Client, source code and developer documentation. Click here to file a bug against Eclipse Platform.

Related Comparisons

PhpStorm vs Vim: What are the differences?

Introduction

User Interface: PhpStorm provides a modern and visually appealing user interface with various features and shortcuts readily available, making it user-friendly for beginners. On the other hand, Vim has a simplistic and minimalistic interface that relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts, which can be intimidating for new users but highly efficient for experienced programmers.
Integration with other tools: PhpStorm comes bundled with various features like version control, debugging tools, and extensions, providing a comprehensive development environment in a single package. In contrast, Vim relies on external plugins and tools for additional functionality, allowing users to customize their setup to fit their specific needs.
Learning Curve: PhpStorm is more approachable for beginners due to its intuitive user interface and documentation, making it easier to get started with coding tasks. Vim, on the other hand, has a steep learning curve with its unique key bindings and modes, requiring time and effort to master but offering unmatched speed and efficiency once mastered.
Cross-Platform Compatibility: PhpStorm is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, providing a consistent coding experience across different operating systems. Vim, however, is a text editor that runs in the terminal and can be used on virtually any platform, making it lightweight and versatile for developers working on multiple systems.
Code Navigation: PhpStorm offers advanced code navigation features like code completion, refactoring tools, and intelligent search capabilities, streamlining the development process and improving productivity. Vim provides powerful navigation options through keyboard shortcuts and commands, allowing users to efficiently move around and edit code without the need for a mouse.
Cost and Licensing: PhpStorm is a commercial product that requires a paid license for full access to all features, while offering a free trial for users to test out the editor. Vim, on the other hand, is an open-source software distributed under a charityware license, allowing users to freely use, modify, and share the editor without any cost.

In Summary, PhpStorm and Vim differ in user interface, integration with other tools, learning curve, compatibility, code navigation capabilities, and cost and licensing.

PhpStorm vs Vim

Overview

PhpStorm vs Vim: What are the differences?