StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. Vim vs VimR

Vim vs VimR

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Vim
Vim
Stacks27.9K
Followers22.8K
Votes2.4K
VimR
VimR
Stacks7
Followers8
Votes0
GitHub Stars6.9K
Forks224

Vim vs VimR: What are the differences?

# Introduction

1. **Language and Platform**: Vim is a text editor that runs in a terminal and is available for various operating systems while VimR is a Mac OS X application that provides a more modern graphical interface for Vim.
2. **User Interface**: Vim has a minimalistic terminal-based interface with keyboard-centric controls, while VimR offers a graphical user interface with traditional menus and clickable buttons.
3. **Installation**: Vim requires manual installation and configuration of plugins for advanced features, whereas VimR comes with built-in plugins and a more user-friendly installation process.
4. **Customization**: Vim allows extensive customization through its configuration files and scripting, while VimR offers limited customization options and relies more on preset settings.
5. **Compatibility**: Vim is widely used across various platforms and can be accessed on remote servers through SSH, whereas VimR is limited to Mac OS X and requires a local installation for use.
6. **Community Support**: Vim has a large and active community that provides plugins, scripts, and support resources, while VimR has a smaller community with fewer resources available for users.

# Summary
In summary, Vim and VimR differ in their language/platform, user interface, installation process, customization options, compatibility, and community support. 

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Vim, VimR

Walter
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
Rogério

Software Developer

Jan 9, 2021

Needs adviceonVisual Studio CodeVisual Studio CodeAtomAtomNode.jsNode.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

Vim
Vim
VimR
VimR

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.

Project VimR is an attempt to refine the Vim experience. The goal is to build an editor that uses Vim inside with many of the convenience GUI features similar to those present in modern editors for Mac.

Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode
Full Vim;File Browser;Fuzzy File Find;Flexible Plugin System
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
6.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
224
Stacks
27.9K
Stacks
7
Followers
22.8K
Followers
8
Votes
2.4K
Votes
0
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
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Vim, VimR?

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.

Neovim

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

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.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana