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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
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  4. Text Editor
  5. VSCode vs Vim vs Visual Studio Code

VSCode vs Vim vs Visual Studio Code

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Vim
Vim
Stacks27.9K
Followers22.8K
Votes2.4K
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

Vim vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

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; Visual Studio Code: Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft. Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Vim and Visual Studio Code belong to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack.

"Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing)", "Fast" and "Highly configurable" are the key factors why developers consider Vim; whereas "Powerful multilanguage IDE", "Fast" and "Front-end develop out of the box" are the primary reasons why Visual Studio Code is favored.

Visual Studio Code is an open source tool with 80.7K GitHub stars and 11.4K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Visual Studio Code's open source repository on GitHub.

Asana, Microsoft, and Intuit are some of the popular companies that use Visual Studio Code, whereas Vim is used by Lyft, Typeform, and CircleCI. Visual Studio Code has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1623 company stacks & 11775 developers stacks; compared to Vim, which is listed in 1159 company stacks and 5671 developer stacks.

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Advice on Vim, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments
Simon
Simon

Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Jan 9, 2020

Decided

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

1.29M views1.29M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Vim
Vim
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

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.

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
178.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
35.9K
Stacks
27.9K
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
22.8K
Followers
169.1K
Votes
2.4K
Votes
2.3K
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
  • 341
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 310
    Fast
  • 194
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
Cons
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 14
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools

What are some alternatives to Vim, Visual Studio Code?

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.

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.

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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