What is the best alternative to&#x20;Textadept?

Dev platforms:Microsoft Windows®; macOS; Linux

With LT's inline evaluation, you don't have to re-compile your whole source file. Each time you want to see an output, all you have to do is hover your cursor over the line you'd like to evaluate and press ctrl+enter; LT will evaluate that line of code for you. See More

1332 410

score 44 · Answer 2

Light Table

Top Pro

Inline evaluation

Top Pro

Your code runs live as you write it

The "Watches" feature lets you see your code running live as you type it. This means that you can debug your code live while writing it, which leads to considerably less programming errors. See More

Top Pro

Plugin manager available

LT has a plugin manager built directly inside of it. This plugin manager connects to LT's own registry of plugins, so whenever you want assistance while writing your HTML, JS, or even Python, just open up the plugin manager, search for it, and click the little install button beside it's name. Your plugin will then be installed. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows; macOS; Linux

Multi Language Support:Y; Language integrations (like inline eval) for Clojure, ClojureScript, Javascript, Python, HTML, and CSS

Price:Free /Opensource

When compared to modern graphical editors like Atom and Brackets (which have underlying HTML5 engines, browsers, Node, etc.), Vim uses a sliver of the system's memory and it loads instantly, all the while delivering the same features. Vim is also faster than Emacs. See More

44 31

score 1977 · Answer 3

Vim

Top Pro

Lightweight and fast

Top Con

High effort to customize

A lot of time and effort is put in to make it specific to your needs. See More

Top Pro

Works in terminal over SSH

Unlike other editors such as Sublime Text, Vim is a command line editor and hence can be used in remote development environments like Chromebooks via SSH. See More

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

You'll spend a lot of time learning all the commands and modes supported in Vim. You'll then spend more time tuning settings to your needs. Although once it's tuned to your needs, you can take your .vimrc to any machine you need and have the same experience across all your computers. See More

Top Pro

Free and open-source software

Vim is open-source, GPL-compatible charityware. See More

Top Con

Poor feature discoverability

Though basic features like syntax checking, autocompletion, and file management are all available out of the box or with minimal configuration, this is not obvious to new users, who might get intimidated or assume they need to install complex plugins just so they can have this functionality. Other features new users might expect to find embedded in Vim, such as debugging, instead follow a UNIX-style model where they are called as external programs, the output of which might then be parsed by Vim so it can display results. Users not familiar with this paradigm will likely fault Vim for lacking those features as well. See More

Top Pro

Extremely portable

Vi/vim exists on almost all Unix-like platforms. It's the de-facto Unix editor and is easily installed on Windows. All you need to make it work is a text-based connection, so it works well for remote machines with slow connections, or when you're too lazy to set up a VNC/Remote Desktop connection. See More

Top Con

Doesn't play nice with the system cut/paste mechanisms

This can be worked around somewhat if you disable mouse for insert mode. You can then right-click your terminal and use paste like you would anywhere else in a terminal. But it still doesn't feel right when the rest of your system uses Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, and you have a system clipboard manager, and so forth. See More

Top Pro

Keyboard-based, mouse-free interface, and trackpad support

There's no need to reach for the mouse or the Ctrl/Alt buttons again. Everything is a mere key press or two away with almost 200 functions specifically for text editing. Vim does support the mouse, but it's designed so you don't have to use it for greater efficiency. Versions of Vim, like gVim or MacVim, still allow you to use the mouse and familiar platform shortcuts. That can help ease the learning curve and you'll probably find you won't want to (or need to) use the mouse after a while. See More

Top Con

Requires Brain Mode Switching

When editing in vim, you have you use the vim keys; when editing in every other window on your PC, or in Word or Excel or other application, you need to use the standard system key combinations. Learning the vim combinations can actually make you SLOWER at everything else. See More

Top Pro

Great productivity

Vim's keyset is mainly restricted to the alphanumeric keys and the escape key. This is an enduring relic of its teletype heritage, but has the effect of making my ost of Vim's functionality accessible without frequent awkward finger reaches. See More

Top Con

Poor support for external tooling

Many plugins depend on optional Python and Lua features, which may or may not be included in whatever binaries are available for your system. And without platform-specific hacks, it is difficult for plugins to operate in the background or use external tooling. See More

Top Pro

Usable from a Terminal or with a GUI (GVim, MacVim)

If you happen to be logged into SSH, you can use Vim in a terminal. It can also run with a GUI too. See More

Top Con

Foreign keyboards have a hard time on Vim out of the box

A lot of frequently-used keybinds are way harder to access on foreign keyboards because they use different layouts. For example, Germans use the QWERTZ layout, while French use the AZERTY. See More

Top Pro

Macros increase productivity

Many text editors have programmable macros, but since Vim is keyboard-based, your programmed macros are usually far more predictable and easier to understand. See More

Top Con

Difficult to copy, paste, and delete

Top Pro

Excellent performance

As it loads the whole file into RAM, replacing all string occurrences in 100 MB+ files is quick and easy. Every other editor has sort of died during that. It is extremely fast even for cold start. Vim is light-weight and very compact. In terminal, it only uses a small amount of memory and anytime you invoke Vim, it's extremely fast. It's immediate, so much so you can't even notice any time lag. See More

Top Con

User must remember commands instead of point at them in a menu

Top Pro

Once learned, it's very hard to forget

Vim's somewhat steep learning curve is more than made up for once you've mastered a few basic concepts and learned the tricks that allow you to program faster with fewer cut/paste mistakes. See More

Top Con

Consume brain energy for editing that should be used for logic

Text editing in vim is awesome, but it requires thinking about combination of commands. In other editors, you don't have to think about how to delete this part of code. You just think about how to implement a feature, what is a good design for this code. Even after you get used to using vim, it still requires your brain for editing. See More

Top Pro

Tons of plugins/add-ons

This makes Vim the definitive resource for every environment (Ruby/Rails, Python, C, etc.), or simply just provides more information in your view. See More

Top Con

Unintuitive mode switching

Top Pro

Everything is mnemonic

No need to memorize different key combinations for things like deleting the text inside of a block or deleting the text inside of a pair of quotes. It's just a series of actions, or nouns and verbs, or however you prefer to think about it. If you want to delete, you select "d"; if you want it to happen inside something, you select "i"; and if you want the surrounding double-quotes, just select ". But if you were changing the text, or copying it, or anything else, you'd still use the same "i" and ". This makes it very easy to remember a large number of different extremely useful commands, without the effort it takes to remember all of the Emacs "magic incantations", for example. See More

Top Con

Outdated UI

Top Pro

Amazing extensibility

Vimscript provides a rich scripting functionality to build upon the core of Vim. When combined with things like Tim Pope's Pathogen plugin management system, it becomes easy to add support for syntax, debugging, build systems, git, and more. See More

Top Con

Slow when opening files with very long lines

A lot of very long lines can make Vim take up to a minute to open files, where a few other editors take only seconds to load the same file. See More

Top Pro

Vimtutor

Vimtutor is an excellent interactive tutorial for people with no prior experience of Vim. It takes about 30 minutes to complete. See More

Top Con

No smooth scrolling

Even with the GUI version, the lines jiggle line-by-line. If you are used to smooth scrolling, this is very annoying, especially when working with larger files. See More

Top Pro

Can never outgrow it

The fact that very few, if any, people claim to be a "Vim Master" is a testament to the breadth and depth of Vim. There is always something new to learn - a new, perhaps more efficient, way to use it. This prevents Vim from ever feeling stale. It's always fresh. See More

Top Con

Works poorly out of the box with right-to-left

Top Pro

Has multiple distinct editing modes

Interaction with Vim is centered around several "modes", where purpose and keybindings differ in each. Insert mode is for entering text. This mode most resembles traditional text entry in most editors. Normal mode (the default) is entered by hitting ESC and converts all keybindings to center around movement within the file, search, pane selection, etc. Command mode is entered by hitting ":" in Normal mode and allows you to execute Vim commands and scripts similar in fashion to a shell. Visual mode is for selecting lines, blocks, and characters of code. Those are the major modes, and several more exist depending on what one defines as a "mode" in Vim. See More

Top Con

Extensibility isn't that great

While it has gotten better and some projects are slowly starting to build proper extension support, it still can't and by design never will achieve the extensibility of another editor like emacs. See More

Top Pro

By default in Linux

All Linux distributions out there will have Vim built into them, which is highly convenient! See More

Top Pro

Has been supported for a long time and will be supported for many years to come

Top Pro

Productivity enhancing modal paradigm

As with all vi-like editors, Vim provides a modal paradigm for text editing and processing that provides a rich syntax and semantic model for composing succinct, powerful commands. While this requires some initial investment in learning how it works in order to take full advantage of its capabilities, it rewards the user well in the long run. This modal interface paradigm also lends itself surprisingly well to many other types of applications that can be controlled by vi-like keybindings, such as browsers, image viewers, media players, network clients (for email and other communication media), and window managers. Even shells (including zsh, tcsh, mksh, and bash, among others) come with vi-like keybinding features that can greatly enhance user comfort and efficiency when the user is familiar with the vi modal editing paradigm. See More

Top Pro

Asynchronous I/O support

Since Vim 8, Vim can exchange characters with background processes asynchronously. This avoids the problem of the text editor getting stuck when a plugin that had to communicate with a server was running. Now plugins can send and receive data from external scripts without forcing Vim to freeze. See More

Top Pro

Flexible feature-set

Vim allows users to include many features found in IDEs and competing editors, but does not force them all on the user. This not only helps keep it lighter in weight than a lot of other options, but it also helps ensure that some unused features will not get in the way. See More

Top Pro

Donations and support to Vim.org helps children in Uganda through ICCF Holland

Top Pro

Built-in package management

Starting with Vim 8, a package manager has been built into Vim. The package manager helps keep track of installed plugins, their versions and also only loads the needed plugins on startup depending on the file type. See More

Top Pro

Can set up keymapping

Top Pro

Vim encourages discipline

If you use Vim long enough, it will rewire your brain to be more efficient. See More

Top Pro

Works on Android

Top Pro

If you can use Vim you can also use vi

Top Pro

Multiple clipboards

It is called "registers". See More

Top Pro

Useful undo features

Vim does not only offer unlimited undo levels, later releases support an undo tree. It eventually gives the editor VCS-like features. You can undo the current file to any point in the past, even if a change was already undone again. Another neat feature is persistent undo, which enables to undo changes after the file was closed and reopened again. See More

Top Pro

Status Booster

Using vim not just increase your productivity, but helps you flex. See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux, macOS, Windows

Emacs can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. While true, I often find the mouse and menus handy for those lesser-used commands. An aide-memoir. See More

1977 392

score 643 · Answer 4

Emacs

Top Pro

Keyboard-focused, mouse-free editing

Top Con

Learning curve is long

While it's better than it used to be, with most functions being possible through the menu, Emacs is still quite a bit different from your standard editor. You'll need to learn new keyboard shortcuts. See More

Top Pro

Total customizability

Customizations can be made to a wide range of Emacs' functions through a Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). A robust list of existing Lisp extensions include the practical (git integration, syntax highlighting, etc) to the utilitarian (calculators, calendars) to the sublime (chess, Eliza). See More

Top Con

Sometimes the extensibility can distract you from your actual work

If I ever want to lose half a day, I'll start by tweaking my .spacemacs config file. See More

Top Pro

It's also an IDE

You can debug, compile, manage files, integrate with version control systems, etc. All through the various plugins that can be installed. See More

Top Con

Documentation is not beginner-friendly

Although lots of good built-in documentation _exists_, I have after four years of Emacs as my primary editor not figured out how to actually make use of it, and rely completely on Google / StackOverflow for help. See More

Top Pro

Works in terminal or as a GUI application

You can use Emacs' command line interface or graphical user interface. See More

Top Con

Hard customization

For customization, you need to learn Lisp See More

Top Pro

Free

Licensed under GNU GPL. See More

Top Con

Keyboard combinations can be confusing for new users

For example, for navigation it uses the b, n, p, l keys. Which for some people may seem strange in the begging. However they can be changed easily. See More

Top Pro

Self documenting

Emacs has extensive help support built-in as well as a tutorial accessed with C-h t. See More

Top Con

A lot of jokes in this serious software

Top Pro

Great documentation

With 30+ years of use the Emacs documentation is very thorough. There are also a lot of tutorials and guides written by third parties. See More

Top Con

Using Emacs on a new machine without your .emacs file

Top Pro

Mini buffer

You can pass complicated arguments in the mini buffer. See More

Top Pro

Ubiquity

Fully compliant GNU-emacs is available on many platforms, and they all understand .emacs configuration files. See More

Top Pro

Rectangular cut and paste

Emacs can select rectangularly. See More

Top Pro

Vi keybindings through Evil mode

Evil mode emulates vim behaviors within Emacs. It enables Vi users to move inside the Emacs universe. See More

Top Pro

Lisp customizations

With lisp customization, any behavior of Emacs can be changed. Update with pre-release patch can be also applied without recompiling the whole Emacs. See More

Top Pro

Visual selection and text objects with Evil

Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It provides Vim features like Visual selection and text objects. See More

Top Pro

dabbrev-expand (Alt-/)

Dynamic word completion. See More

Top Pro

Provides org-mode

Advanced planning and publication which can start as a simple list. See More

Top Pro

Enormous range of functionalities (way beyond simple "text editing")

Through its programmability, a very broad range of functionalities can be integrated in emacs, turning it even into a "single point of contact" with the underlying operating system. See More

Top Pro

Support multi-line editing, multiple frame, powerful paren, crazy jumping style

Review the "Emacs Rocks" video. See More

Top Pro

Has been widely used for a long time

The first verion of Emacs was written in 1974 and GNU Emacs in 1984. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Works on Linux, Windows, Macintosh, BSD, and others. See More

Top Pro

Integrates planning in your development process

You can jump straight from your org-mode files to programming tasks - and back - and build a seamless workflow. See More

Top Pro

Helm plugin adds even more power to Emacs

Powerful commands, search, and more with the Helm plugin. See More

Top Pro

GTK+ widgets support

Since version 25 you can run GTK widgets inside Emacs buffers. One of these is the WebKitGTK+, which allows the user to run a full-featured web browser inside Emacs with JavaScript and CSS support among other things. See More

Top Pro

Versatile

Emacs is great for everything. See More

Top Pro

Interactive Shells

Emacs has a number of shell variants: ansi-term, shell, and eshell. See More

Top Pro

Gnus

Managing several large mailing lists has never been easier using Gnus. The threading commands and the various ways of scoring articles means that I never miss important messages/authors, etc. A joy to use. See More

Top Pro

eshell is cross platform

You can use the underlying operating system shell as a terminal emulation in an Emacs buffer. Don't like the default shell for your configuration? You can change it to your liking. See More

Top Pro

Excelent tutorial to get you started

The tutorial you are presented with at startup shows you exactly what you need to get started and teaches you how to use the built-in help yourself later. See More

Top Pro

Excellent Lisp editing support

Built-in packages make editing Lisp source code feel natural. See More

Top Pro

use-package and org-mode

Missing some neural package that predicts actions Maybe in the next release ... See More

Specs

Platforms:Unix-like, Windows

You don't need the mouse to use Howl. Everything can be accomplished with commands and shortcuts. See More

643 147

score 21 · Answer 5

Howl

Top Pro

Keyboard driven

Top Con

Lack of Lua examples

Although Howl can be extended in both Lua and MoonScript, almost all bundles are written in MoonScript. This means that it is a bit harder to find examples if you'd rather write your bundle in Lua. MoonScript can be compiled to Lua but the code won't be as clean and understandable as if it would've been written in Lua by hand. See More

Top Pro

Fast startup

It's extremely lightweight, making it start up pretty quickly. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Howl is very intuitive and easy to use. See More

Top Pro

Easy to extend

Plugins (bundles) can be written in Lua or MoonScript. See More

Top Pro

UI Focused on editting

Non distracted icons, toolbars, pannels, extra spacing, etc. See More

Top Pro

Language tooling

Has built-in functionality for completion, inline documentation and linting so IDE-like features can be added easily. See More

Top Pro

Command line palette

Search for your commands in an easy way and see in the list which key-strokes are mapped to which commands See More

Top Pro

Open source

Howl is an open source project and is actively developed on GitHub(howl-editor/howl). It has a MIT license. See More

Top Pro

Works on OpenBSD

Specs

Platforms:Windows; OSX; *nix

Kate supports syntax highlighting for over 180 languages, from Assembler to Zsh See More

21 4

score 89 · Answer 6

Kate

Top Pro

Syntax highlighting

Top Con

Hard to install on Windows or OS X

Kate can be a little hard to install and configure, especially for beginners. On Linux or BSD, it can be easily installed from your distribution's repositories. See More

Top Pro

By far one of the best and lightest text editors.

Notepads alternative. (for the windows users) See More

Top Pro

Project mode

Kate allows you to make projects to simplify the organisation of your code. This brings in additional organization of an IDE without the overhead. See More

Top Pro

Edit over FTP, SSH, or other protocols

Kate uses KDE's input and output libraries to read and write files, allowing seamless integration with FTP, SMB, SFTP, and many other protocols. See More

Top Pro

Fast and minimaistic

Kate is pretty fast and lightweight. This helps it with it's start up speed. See More

Top Pro

Integrated terminal

Has a terminal that can sync to the location of your document, letting you compile or run your program quickly or run quick commands, all without leaving the editor. See More

Top Pro

Vi entry mode

Kate has a vi entry mode. See More

Top Pro

Thriving plugin ecosystem

Lots of plugins allow Kate to expand or shrink based on your needs. It includes GDB integration, XML completion, and symbol viewing to speed up programming. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows; OSX; *nix

Supported remote file editing protocols:FTP; HTTP; SSH; WebDAV

Collaborative editing:No

Spacemacs combines the Emacs platform (with the full power of the Emacs plugin ecosystem) and the Vi keybindings (via EViL), all in the same box. See More

89 14

score 531 · Answer 7

Spacemacs

Top Pro

Combines the best parts of Vi and Emacs

Top Con

Can be quite glitchy at times

Spacemacs combines many packages from many different authors that were never designed to work together. Sometimes they interact in unexpected ways, and things randomly break as one package interferes with another's features. This combined with frequent package updates and necessary customization by selection of layers and packages, can make these glitches hard to reproduce. It takes a lot of emacs know-how to fix these problems. Fortunately there is a very active community willing to help with these problems, but it might take a while. See More

Top Pro

Simple but powerful configuration architecture

At the heart of Spacemacs, the configuration layers group packages configuration into semantic units that can be toggled on and off. The architecture is simple but powerful, allowing the user to easily manage configuration dependencies between hundreds of packages. See More

Top Con

Complex learning difficulty

You must be familiar with either Vim or Emacs. In addition, you should be familiar with the unique features of Spacemacs. The Layer concept of replacing Emacs settings is still difficult and abstract compared to modern editors. See More

Top Pro

Above average documentation quality

Documentation is mandatory for each new configuration layer and can be accessed directly within the editor in Org format. See More

Top Con

Functionality layers of complicated configuration

To configure Spacemacs, settings for Emacs/Evil/Spacemacs may need editing. It's not always clear which need to be changed or how to change settings globally: sometimes hooks are needed, other times Spacemacs provides options. See More

Top Pro

Community-driven configuration

Spacemacs is the biggest community-driven Emacs starter-kit. See More

Top Con

High CPU and unresponsive at times

There are occasions when Spacemacs would suddenly consume a LOT of CPU and then other times would become completely unresponsive. This instability took place only 6 months or so ago. Restarting Spacemacs can fix it for a while but perhaps this issue is already fixed in newer versions. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Emacs runs on Gnu/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. See More

Top Con

Relative low startup time

Although configuration is heavily loaded, the starting time of Spacemacs is usually between two and five seconds. Emacs can be run as a daemon though which reduces the client's startup time to a few milliseconds. Still not as bad as other editors though, especially Electron based ones like VSCode or Atom. See More

Top Pro

Completely configured out of the box

Stuff like version control, file management, good default theme are all configured out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Great support from the community

The community surrounding Spacemacs is very active and there is a welcoming gitter chat for users to ask questions. See More

Top Pro

Can be controlled fully with the keyboard

There's no need to reach for the mouse again since Spacemacs can be fully controlled with keyboard. See More

Top Pro

Mnemonic and consistent keybindings

Space-lead key bindings are organized in mnemonic namespaces. For instance, buffer actions are under SPC b, file actions are under SPC f, project actions are under SPC p, search actions are under SPC s, and so on. Keybindings are consistent across the whole distribution thanks to a set of conventions. See More

Top Pro

Fast-paced development

New functionalities and fixes are added to Spacemacs every day, while release cycles are short. See More

Top Pro

Lowers the risk of RSI by using the spacebar as leader

Spacemacs got its name from the fact that it is uses the space bar as a default leader key. The key was chosen because it is easy to press and to hopefully lower the risk of RSI. See More

Top Pro

Gradual learning curve

Evil package is a first class citizen and Spacemacs embraces it from day one. Evil package allows Vim users to be productive very quickly while still allowing regular Emacs users to use Spacemacs. See More

Top Pro

Manage many code bases easily

Top Pro

Remote file editing

Files can be edited in Spacemacs remotely. See More

Top Pro

Great note-taking and agenda mode built-in

Allows for great organization applications that can be saved in future-proof format, plain text, can be integrated with org, LaTeX, markdown, HTML, Literate Programming and be committed to source control. See More

Top Pro

Offers a number of practical features

Spacemacs has some great features for taking notes, tracking to-do lists, and tracking time. See More

Top Pro

LaTeX support

LaTeX allows for auto-completion, syncing, and more. See More

Top Pro

Can work in terminal mode

Sometimes you only have terminal access, over ssh or something. See More

Top Pro

Works well with Common Lisp

Top Pro

Daemon support

Has great daemon support, which can mitigate the issue of slow startup. See More

Top Pro

Easily extended with community plugins

Top Pro

Great CFEngine support

Syntax highlighting and org-babel extensions. See More

Top Pro

Manage R files easily

Top Pro

Great Clojure support

Top Pro

Excellent support for Elixir programming language

Elixir layer which uses the Alchemist package is the best way to edit Elixir code out there. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, MacOS, Linux

License:GPLv3

NeoVim was a complete rewrite of Vim, with new features added and underlying issues resolved thanks to the Vim code base. The keybindings and configuration are the same as Vim, so the switch can be pretty simple. See More

531 66

score 408 · Answer 8

Neovim

Top Pro

Still Vim but with upgraded features and some issues fixed

Top Con

Limited cross platform support

Neovim is not available for many legacy platforms See More

Top Pro

Modern code base

As a refactor over Vim, Neovim has greatly improved its code base. For example, some functionality is handled by libuv, the same code base that powers Node.js. See More

Top Con

Poor feature discoverability

Top Pro

Built-in terminal emulator

This avoids the user having to make any installations. See More

Top Con

Requires Brain Mode Switching

When editing in vim, you have you use the vim keys; when editing in every other window on your PC, or in Word or Excel or other application, you need to use the standard system key combinations. Learning the vim combinations can actually make you SLOWER at everything else. See More

Top Pro

Better integration with external tools

The core text editor is "headless", meaning it's detached from the user-interface so other programs can hook into it. This enables better integration with IDEs and browsers, where "Vim mode" has typically been a poor substitute because it was a partial rewrite or a partial port at best. One of the advantages of Vim has always been ubiquity and Neovim makes it even more ubiquitous. See More

Top Con

Consume brain energy for editing that should be used for logic

Text editing in vim can be great once you've learned it, but it requires thinking about combination of commands. In other editors, you don't have to think about how to delete this part of code. You just think about how to implement a feature, what is a good design for this code. Even after you get used to using vim, it still requires your brain for editing. See More

Top Pro

Powerful plugin model

Vim plugins have always been useful, but tied to specific languages. Neovim's architecture provides better separation between plugins and the core product, so that plugins are completely flexible and can be written in any language. See More

Top Con

Ambiguity in extensive documentation

Top Pro

Comes with some good configurations out of the box

Some typical configurations most of VIM users make are default in Neovim. See More

Top Con

High effort to customize

A lot of time and effort is put in to make it specific to your needs. See More

Top Pro

UI Agnostic

The core functionality is handled apart from the UI, meaning that Neovim can be embedded into any other GUI system, such as Atom. See More

Top Con

Split the VIM community

Moolenaar to be blamed for. If he opened up the development for vim to other bright minds, no fork would have happened. As it is mostly compatible with vim, it is not such a big issue. See More

Top Pro

Async plugin execution

Top Con

Poor support for external tooling

Top Pro

Opens a 3Gig Text File in a few seconds

Not many editors can open such a large text file so quickly. See More

Top Pro

Active development community

Top Pro

Fast and light on memory usage

New neovim editor instance starts instantly and you can have multiple editors open at the same time, because id does not require a lot of memory to run. See More

Top Pro

Work in TUI (Tex User Interface)

Neovim can work on terminal, on a remote server over ssh. See More

Top Pro

Easier to pick-up than ever

Don't believe it? Try typing vimtutor in your command line right now. See More

Top Pro

Even more powerful since 2019, because of additions such as vim-coc, TabNine, fzf, skim

Vim gets stronger every time command-line tools get stronger. This isn't even it's the final form. See More

Top Pro

Config file is where it should be

I don't like having dotfiles or dotdirs in my homefolder unless they're needed. Configs should be in the .config dir in their respective folder. See More

Top Pro

Built-in file-explorer and ability to make splits and edit multiple things simutaneously.

This makes editing multiple files at once, moving code around so easy. See More

Top Pro

Terminal mode is very convenient for testing code in a split window

Specs

Platforms:Linux, Windows, macOS, *nix, Android

408 76

score 3276 · Answer 9

Visual Studio Code

Top Pro

Extendable through plug-ins

Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality. See More

Top Con

The autocomplete and code check is not as powerful as the one on WebStorm

Sometimes it doesn't tell you if you made a typo in a method name or if a method is not used and several other important features. See More

Top Pro

TypeScript integration

There is very solid TypeScript integration in Visual Studio Code. Both are developed by Microsoft and VSC itself is written in TypeScript. See More

Top Con

Embedded Git isn't powerful enough

You can do nothing but to track changes, stage them and commit. No history, visualization, rebasing or cherry-picking – these things are left to git console or external git client. See More

Top Pro

Embedded Git control

Visual Studio Code has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows. See More

Top Con

Project search limits results

Because file search is so slow your results are limited in order to simulate a faster search. See More

Top Pro

Integrated debugging

VSC includes debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Very bad auto import

Top Pro

JavaScript IntelliSense support

JavaScript IntelliSense allows Visual Studio Code to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code. See More

Top Con

Generalized

VS Code is a general code/scripting IDE built to be lightweight and for people familiar with their language of choice, not directly comparable to Visual Studio in power or scope. See More

Top Pro

Great performance

For a 'wrapped' web-based application, Visual Studio Code performs very well. See More

Top Con

Memory hog

Allegedly, VS Code is "lightweight". Yet, running multiple instances of it at once, you may get many "out of memory" messages from Windows despite 16 GB RAM. (While of course also running other things. The point is the comparison with some other IDEs/editors where running them alongside the same number of other applications doesn't cause Windows to run out of memory) See More

Top Pro

Integrated terminal

There's no need to press alt+tab to go to a terminal: it is directly integrated into the editor. Shift+~ is a handy hotkey to toggle the integrated terminal. See More

Top Con

A "me too" offering from MS, far behind other well established editors that it attempts to clone

Other IDEs specific to a language often offer better tools for deep programming. See More

Top Pro

Ready to use out of the box

You don't need to configure and add plugins before being productive. However, you can add plugins if needed but for the basics you're well covered. See More

Top Con

Slow launch time

Than it's competitors, e.g. Sublime Text. See More

Top Pro

Updated frequently

There's a new release of Visual Studio Code every month. If you are one of the insiders then releases are daily. See More

Top Con

Emmet plugin often fails on even simple p tags

Top Pro

Extensions (aka plugins) are written in JavaScript

Extensions are written in either Typescript or JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Have no good default js style analyzer

In WebStorm there is analyzer that checks for warnings and highlight this in yellow, here you cannot find or add it even with plugins. It is possible to have it as errors with linter but while you are actively changing file that's not very nice. See More

Top Pro

Integrated task runners

Task runners display lists of available tasks and performing these tasks is as simple as a click of the mouse. See More

Top Con

File search is extremely slow

It's absolutely not possible to use this tool with big projects given how long it takes to search for files. See More

Top Pro

Libre/open source

Released under the MIT License. See More

Top Con

.sass linting is terrible

Top Pro

ESLint integration

ESLint integrates great. You can define your rules trough .eslintrc.* as usual and vs code will autofix your code on save. So your code is always in style. See More

Top Con

Is not an IDE, is a text editor

Top Pro

Active development

It's really nice to see how the code editor evolves. Every month there is a new version with great communication of new features and changes. See More

Top Pro

Custom snippets support

Snippets are templates that will insert text for you and adapt it to their context, and in VSC they are highly customizable. See More

Top Pro

Fast and powerful

VS-Code has the speed of Sublime and the power of WebStorm. Perhaps this is the best software that Microsoft has ever created. See More

Top Pro

Huge community behind it

The ease of getting assistance and finding tutorials is increasing as the community grows. See More

Top Pro

It has gotten really good

All it takes is one stop for all the features many people need. See More

Top Pro

JS typechecking

It leverages TypeScript compiler functionality to statically type check JS (type inference, JSDoc types) with "javascript.implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true option. See More

Top Pro

Python support

Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension. See More

Top Pro

Good support for new Emmet syntax

Top Pro

High fidelity C# plugin

The Omnisharp plugin is very powerful providing full sln, csproj, and project.json support. See More

Top Pro

Support RTL languages

It supports pretty web rtl languages like arabic languages when most of other editors don't support it. See More

Top Pro

Inline definition picking and usages finding

These features allow you to have a glance at code without opening it as a whole in a separate tab. Moreover, editing is allowed. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

Notepad++ has built-in support for syntax highlighting for a wide selection of programming languages. See More

3276 656

score 476 · Answer 10

Notepad++

Top Pro

Syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages

Top Con

Windows-only

While it can run in Wine, it is native only to Windows. Linux users will have to use Notepadqq instead. See More

Top Pro

Light and fast

Notepad++ is a very light program that starts almost instantly. This makes it a great text editor for users that want something that will start the second they open it. See More

Top Con

Outdated UI

Only the text area can be themed, and it doesn't have as many features as browser-based text areas. See More

Top Pro

Portable

You can get a portable version of N++ and put it on a flash drive or your dropbox account and have your editor, configured the way you like, at any computer that you are on. See More

Top Con

Limited new syntax support for new languages

It may be hard to find good plugins for relatively new languages. See More

Top Pro

Extendable via plugins

A list of hundreds of plugins is maintained. See More

Top Con

Settings confusingly scattered

Examples: try to change the tab size or used font. See More

Top Pro

Free under GPL

Notepad++ is licensed under GPL, which means it is free/open source software that you can use freely. See More

Top Con

Session backups not enabled by default

Unsaved tabs will be lost when Npp crashes, unless you first enable the session backup option. See More

Top Pro

Regex replace in selection, active tab, or all tabs

In Notepad++, the user can utilise regular expressions to quickly modify text across multiple files. See More

Top Con

User defined language doesn't support triple quote strings

It also doesn't support triple hashed comments. Both styles are overridden by their single character single line version. See More

Top Pro

Persistent documents, even after exiting the application

If you close Notepad++ (npp), your documents remain even if you haven't saved. See More

Top Con

Annoying update notifications upon start-up

Annoying update notifications tend to pop up upon start-up after not having used the app or machine for a few days. At the same time, they can be easily turned off. See More

Top Pro

Split screen

The user can open and edit files in multiple screens within the editor window. See More

Top Pro

Multi-line editing

While it is disabled by default, when enabled, it is possible to edit more than one line at a time. This is helpful in many situations. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use and admin

Very easy to use and personalize. See More

Top Pro

User defined language syntax support

You can define your own custom syntax highlighting rules (or add support for others) . See More

Top Pro

Supports Markdown

If you have the Plugin Manager installed you can search for MarkdownViewer++ and install it via that plugin. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows

Auto Complete:Yes

It follows the UNIX philosophy by doing one thing well (text editing) and interfaces nicely with other CLI tools. See More

476 141

score 48 · Answer 11

Kakoune

Top Pro

Good UNIX citizen

Top Con

Small community

Top Pro

Will be familiar to vim users

Kakoune first started as a rewrite from scratch of vim, but then ended up being another text editor altogether. So it's inspired in a lot of ways from vim. See More

Top Con

Default bindings do not play nice with OS X (Alt+???)

Top Pro

Very expressive

Kakoune provides a very expressive set of commands, including various objects selection (paragraph, blocks, words), alignment support, conditional selection filtering... This set of command is expressive enough to implement all the provided auto indentation logic. See More

Top Con

No real Windows support

Will compile under CygWin. See More

Top Pro

More modern than vim

Top Con

Written in C++

Top Pro

Actively developed and supported

Top Pro

Text selection mechanism

Kakoune works on selections, which are oriented, inclusive range of characters, selections have an anchor and a cursor character. Most commands move both of them, except when extending selection where the anchor character stays fixed and the cursor one moves around. See More

Top Pro

Simpler and more consistent than Vim

Some keys select, other keys operate on the selections. Shift is used to extend the selection, alt is used for alternative behavior, e.g. reverse the search direction. No inconsistencies like Y which means yy and not y$ in Vim. See More

Top Pro

Self-documenting

A helper pops up when typing commands. See More

Slap is written in JavaScript and it requires something to interpret it in a local machine. That something is node.js, but for people who don't need node, it would be a hindrance and an overkill to install node just to use a simple text editor. Furthermore, it can only be used remotely if the remote machine has node installed. See More

48 3

score 12 · Answer 12

Slap

Top Con

Requires node.js

Top Pro

First-class mouse support

Slap supports mouse keybindings even though it works inside the terminal and also through SSH. See More

Top Con

CLI only

Slap only runs through the terminal. See More

Top Pro

Uses desktop-like keybindings

Slap features configurable keybindings (Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, etc). See More

Top Pro

Great terminal interface

Specs

Platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux

It's only available for Windows. See More

12 11

score 15 · Answer 13

PSPad

Top Pro

Integrated FTP client

Top Con

Windows only

Top Pro

Simple and small

PSPad is simple, small, and lightweight. It's also quite fast. See More

Top Con

No code folding

Does not support code folding. See More

Top Pro

Free

PSPad is completely free to download and use. See More

Top Con

No content assist

Top Pro

Code highlighting for many languages

PSPad supports code highlighting for several languages. See More

Top Pro

Accented words

In PSPad, the user can add accents to words. See More

Top Pro

Integrated HEX editor

Specs

Platforms:Windows

License:Freeware

Supported remote file editing protocols:FTP

Including e.g. Chinese. See More

15 2

score 2 · Answer 14

qemacs (for quick emacs)

Top Pro

Input methods for most (human) languages

Top Pro

Terminal and graphics mode

Supports the terminal mode with 'qemacs -nw' and a graphics mode. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation and help

Context sensitive shortcut help on F1. Good online documentation. See More

Top Pro

Comfortable file browser

Easy to open and manage files (dired-mode). See More

Top Pro

Supports many editing modes besides text

Hex HTML / CSS Image Audio/video (maybe not the most sought after mode in a text editor, but, well, it's there) See More

Top Pro

Full UTF-8 support

Including bi-directional writing. See More

Top Pro

Super lightweight and fast

Top Pro

Emacs like key-bindings

Use your muscle memory if you know Emacs already. See More

Spacemacs is just a well-configured Emacs distribution with community-sourced best in class plugins and layers selected to take the setup pain out of Emacs. Evil mode gives the Vim bindings and modes for fast editing, while Helm makes everything discoverable to make learning to be more productive simple and unintrusive. See More

2 0

score 53 · Answer 15

Spacemacs

Top Pro

Preconfigured emacs distro

Top Con

Emacs is slow

Emacs is single threaded which means that if you enable all the great features you might be used to from Vim, it will run noticeably slower which can be quite frustrating at times. There are efforts at a concurrent Emacs, but they don't seem to be going anywhere. See More

Top Pro

VIM Keybindings with EMACS ecosystem

EMACS ecosystem and language support is best in show. The EMACS is a great IDE that was in search of a good text editor. Spacemacs makes EMACS have a good text editor. See More

53 8

score 40 · Answer 16

BBEdit

Top Pro

Stable development, been around for decades

BBEdit is commercial software, the paid counterpart to their free application Textwrangler. Though BBEdit comes off as pricey, this allows for stable and consistent updates from the developers. BBEdit has been around since 1992. See More

Top Con

Featureless

Top Pro

Can open very large files

Top Con

Expensive

It's US$49.99 a single user license. See More

Top Pro

Just about every feature is already built in

No searching for plug-ins that may or may not work. See More

Top Pro

Great customer support

The developer is very responsive to bug reports and feature suggestions. See More

Top Pro

Native application

Follows platform standards. See More

Top Pro

Built-in FTP/SFTP browser

BBEdit can open files directly from, and save them to, any available FTP server. It can also open and save files directly via SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol). See More

Top Pro

Great JAMStack environment

You can build the static site of your dreams without needing any external assistants. Although it does not process LESS, SASS, or SCSS files, BBEdit's includes are very powerful. See More

Specs

Platforms:OSX

License:Proprietary

Price:49.99

Collaborative editing:No

Editra's UI is rather ugly and outdated and the color scheme is not as sleek as the other options out there. See More

40 9

score 1 · Answer 17

Editra

Top Pro

Very customizable

Top Con

UI is ugly and outdated

Top Pro

Small and portable

Editra's small size makes it extremely fast and portable. It can be uploaded in a USB drive and be used on the go. See More

Top Pro

Powerful

Editra can open more than 60 different types of source code, each with syntax highlighting and many other features. It also has many widgets that can be installed to make the user experience easier (you can download them from the main site). See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform and open source

Editra can run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Its sources are easily available from the site. See More

Top Pro

Simple

Editra has a simple and very customizable UI. See More

Top Pro

Python IDE

It's written in Python and can also be used as a Python IDE. Just by extending it through the installation of additional features and widgets, Editra can become an IDE for any programming language it supports. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux

License:wxWindows

Column selection:Yes

Supported keybinding styles:Vi

Yi has default configurations for Vim, Emacs, as well as CUA. It also makes several improvements that includes Sublime-like (multiple) cursors. See More

1 0

score 15 · Answer 18

Yi

Top Pro

Combines and improves upon the best text-editing features from your favorite editors

Top Con

Very few plugins available

Even though Yi is a general purpose text editor similar to Vim and Emacs, almost all of the plugins that have been written for Yi so far focus on supporting Haskell as a programming environment. See More

Top Pro

More performant than Vim

Vim can be rather slow due the age of its code base. In particular, running large macros in Vim can be rather painful. Since Yi is being built from scratch it has been engineered for performance and with the benefit of hindsight. See More

Top Con

No way to reuse your existing customizations and keybindings

If you have spent years crafting your .vimrc or .emacs, there's no way to reuse it in Yi. You have to start from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Extensible and modular editing features

As far as extensibility goes, Yi easily outstrips any other open-source text editor. Motions can be built from parser combinators, making them simultaneously flexible and modular - an open source hacker's dream. See More

Top Con

Requires Haskell to compile and configure

GHC + Haskell packages makes for a rather large installation, which is a big ask for a relatively obscure terminal editor. See More

Top Pro

Plugins work together

Packages work together because they compile together. See More

UltraEdit has small memory usage and allows for fast parsing/searching when handling large files. See More

15 4

score 38 · Answer 19

UltraEdit

Top Pro

Handles large files (>1GB) extremely well

Top Con

Proprietary

It's not free and a license costs $79.99. See More

Top Pro

Works perfectly with remote files

Supports several protocols for accessing remote files and working on them with the same ease as local files. Files can be integrated in the projects as normal files. See More

Top Con

The themes introduced in version 20 regressed certain aspects of syntax coloring

The themes simplified the syntax highlighting which lost the capacity to have as many colors as one wanted to define. Now it is limited to around 20 different colors. In general it's not a problem but in certain cases it broke coloring. For some reason, the classic theme is the only one that is totally pleasant for readability well with syntax highlighting. See More

Top Pro

Fast, stable, easy to use

It loads with a short delay, but once loaded it's snappy and rock-solid. Anyone accustomed to using Windows text editors will feel at home in its interface, and those that prefer alternate keybindings can easily change them. See More

Top Pro

Probably the most versatile general editor in existence.

If you need a general editor, UltraEdit is the way to go. If you were writing C/C++ all day, then this would be your editor. If you need to slog through large files then this is your go to editor. If you need to go through XML files, then this is your editor. If you need to sort data, then this your my editor. See More

Top Pro

Search and replace capabilities

From Ultraedit to Perl to Unix regex engines, the search and replace can accomplish just about anything. See More

Top Pro

Responsive company

Whether for feature requests, technical support or license questions, IDM is always quick to respond. See More

Top Pro

Nice hex display & edit

There's a handful of other features like this that make UltraEdit indispensable. See More

Top Pro

Extremely customizable GUI editor

UltraEdit offer the best of both worlds. it has a full on GUI along with all the shortcut commands you need. There's no need for the user to suffer 80 char limitations of a terminal editor. See More

Top Pro

Highly flexible

UltraEdit allows you to handle groups of files as a project. See More

Geany is very lightweight thanks to the smaller offering of features. See More

38 9

score 210 · Answer 20

Geany

Top Pro

Light and fast

Top Con

Not very advanced

Although it has some IDE features, it is not as advanced as some other text editors that can be extended to contain IDE functionality. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Geany is a cross platform editor, very similar to Notepad++ in Windows. See More

Top Con

Not many third-party plugins

Geany is not as popular as some other text editors with plugin support. As such it's understandable that it's missing lots of powerful plugins available in other editors. See More

Top Pro

Built-in plugin manager

Geany has a built-in plugin manager which can be used to install plugins and add new powerful features to the editor. See More

Top Con

Windows installer not digitally signed

Top Pro

Build in terminal

Press F5 and code will run without the need to switch between windows. See More

Top Pro

Native

It is a real app and not another frankenstein web/electron app. This means it runs great and doesn't extraordinary amounts of RAM. See More

Top Pro

Actively developed Free (as in freedom) Software

This software respects your freedom. See More

Top Pro

Simple project management

Top Pro

Real syntax parsing (not just coloring)

Hence it is capable of showing the methods and inner classes of, e.g., a Java source file. See More

Top Pro

Options in the menu are easy to find

For example, there is an easy way to change the font and theme in the View menu. No need to search through several syntax styles like in Notepad++ just to be able to change the used font. See More

Top Pro

Quick search on large files

In Geany you technically search once for a whole search query, unlike Gedit, where once you start typing, the file is searched for in accordance with each substring of what you're typing, all the while leading to terribly annoying lag. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows; OSX; *nix