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Textadept vs Vim: What are the differences?
What is Textadept? *A fast, minimalist, and extensible cross-platform text editor *. A fast, minimalist, and remarkably extensible text editor for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Textadept runs on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and BSD. It also has a terminal version, which is ideal for work on remote machines.
What is Vim? 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.
Textadept and Vim belong to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Textadept are:
- Fast and Minimalist
- Cross Platform
- Remarkably Extensible
On the other hand, Vim provides the following key features:
- Vertically Split Windows
- Vimdiff
- Folding
For a Visual Studio Code/Atom developer that works mostly with Node.js/TypeScript/Ruby/Go 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?
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.
Actually, the biggest advantage with Neovim (as a VS user) is that you can embed REAL Neovim as the editor UI, rather than using a "Vim emulation", you're using actual NVIM, embedded in VS!
"asvetliakov.vscode-neovim" is the extension you are looking for:
- Install the 'vscode-neovim; extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim)
- Install Neovim version 0.5+ nightly
- Start winning.
(You can install neovim-nightly separately for just vscode, I usually build and install it to /opt/nvim - it's enough enough to do - let me know if you need help).
Works wonderfully. It might not work out of the box if you have some 100K epic nvim initialization file, but the plugin documents a workaround for having an embedding/VS specific configuration.
I don't actually notice much of a difference between the two, as the end result looks identical. If you use Vim and are switch to Neovim it's an extremely easy 1-minute process. I switched from Vim to Neovim. I can't say I found much of a difference, but the key points where Neovim could be better than just vim is that first, there are much more people maintaining Neovim compared to vim, which means fewer bugs and a modern code base. It also has a smaller code base which might result in a small speed improvement. Another thing is that it's basically just a fork of vim, so what harm can it do? ;)
I recommend using vim 8+
it has native plugin support
if you need language supports you can install the package vim-nox
which will come with support for python, lua, ruby, etc
It truly depends on whether you want to completely avoid GUI and stick to TUI and command lines. If you want to edit all of your codes within a terminal, then Vim or neovim would be the choice. Emacs can be run in a terminal, but the functionality is limited. Most people use Emacs using GUI and emacs-client not to use too much memory.
My general preference is to use an independent text editor, which is better if it is highly customizable and programmable. So, I have used Emacs for several years. For beginners, I guess Emacs requires significant time to learn to fully enjoy its wonderful functionalities. In that sense, using atom would be a recommendable option.
Regardless of all the situations, learning basic vim in the terminal will help you in any case. In summary, I recommend 1. vim as a default editor in the terminal 2. atom if you are a beginner, or 3. Emacs if you have a long-term plan to master a programmable editor
Other editors like sublime text, VS code, and so forth are also worth learning and using. But, no matter which editor you choose, stick to one or two until you become an advanced user. Being able to use most text editors at an intermediate level is waste of time.
I hope it helps.
The hints on the codebase's contributors and the VSCode integration helped me make up my mind.
I really appreciate all comments, though.
Thanks a bunch!
Pros of Textadept
- Fast1
Pros of Vim
- Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing)347
- Fast328
- Highly configurable312
- Less mouse dependence297
- Lightweight247
- Speed145
- Plugins100
- Hardcore97
- It's for pros82
- Vertically split windows65
- Open-source30
- Modal editing25
- No remembering shortcuts, instead "talks" to the editor22
- It stood the Test of Time21
- Unicode16
- VimPlugins13
- Everything is on the keyboard13
- Stick with terminal13
- Dotfiles12
- Flexible Indenting11
- Hands stay on the keyboard10
- Efficient and powerful10
- Programmable10
- Everywhere9
- Large number of Shortcuts9
- A chainsaw for text editing8
- Unmatched productivity8
- Developer speed7
- Super fast7
- Makes you a true bearded developer7
- Because its not Emacs7
- Modal editing changes everything7
- You cannot exit6
- Themes6
- EasyMotion5
- Most and most powerful plugins of any editor5
- Shell escapes and shell imports :!<command> and !!cmd5
- Intergrated into most editors5
- Shortcuts5
- Great on large text files5
- Habit5
- Plugin manager options. Vim-plug, Pathogen, etc5
- Intuitive, once mastered4
- Perfect command line editor4
- Not MicroSoft1
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Cons of Textadept
Cons of Vim
- Ugly UI8
- Hard to learn5