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4.7 star rating
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What is the best alternative to DiffMerge?
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AraxisMerge
All
8
Experiences
Pros
6
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Pro
Point and click merging
AraxisMerge has a feature which is very helpful especially for beginners. By clicking on different parts of a text file you can select all the parts to added in a final merged file. The comparison display also updates real-time as the merge happens.
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Top
Con
Commercial
AraxisMerge is not free: $129 Standard and $269 Professional But this is peanuts for a tool that you can use all day for the rest of your developer life.
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Top
Pro
Directory comparisons
AraxisMerge supports comparing different directories with each other.
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Top
Pro
Beautiful interface
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Top
Pro
Three way merges
AraxisMerge supports three way merges.
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Top
Pro
Update alternative files Word, PDF and even images
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Top
Pro
Works great on large files
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows, Mac
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Experiences
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46
3
Kdiff3
All
17
Experiences
Pros
9
Cons
7
Specs
Top
Pro
Supports 3 way merges
For modern version control systems, 3way merge support is a basic requirement, but many other open source diff viewers do not adequately handle 3way merges.
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Top
Con
Cannot do inline diffs
Comparison of 2 files is always side-by-side and there's no option for inline views. Overall a rather poor and confusing UI in general.
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Top
Pro
Free and open source
KDiff3 is completely free to download and use. It's also open source released under the GPL.
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Top
Con
Confusing GUI
4 sub-windows (when you really only need 3), a lot of different colors and even more confusing result-window. No links what has changed between versions and and the result. It clearly shows it's dated or rather outdated. Great if you ever need to do a command line merge, otherwise it sucks.
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Top
Pro
Can compare directories
It is able to compare whole directory trees.
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Top
Con
No precise editing of the compared files
Precise work line-after-line is not possible. Only a version after the automated merge-step is editable, but not the two files separately.
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Top
Pro
Supports editing files directly
In addition to comparing two files it also allows you to edit the merge result right in place.
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Top
Con
No longer supported by Homebrew for MacOS
Cannot be installed easily on Mac as of Aug 2019.
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Top
Pro
Diff by character not by lines
On comparing two files, difference is shown by characters; not by lines.
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Top
Con
Problems when files have different number of lines
For example, if you add 3 lines: A, B and C locally but on the other change there are only A and C, Kdiff3 will work out that A was added, then it says that B conflicts with C but adds C again anyway.
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Top
Pro
The UI is customizable
Allow customizing colors regardless of user/system theme.
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Top
Con
Slow for large files
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Top
Pro
Supports manual code aligning
With selecting code in one window and hitting Ctrl+Y, then selecting some other code in second window and also hitting Ctrl+Y you can manually align the code.
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Top
Con
No image compare
Compare is text based.
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Top
Pro
Preprocessing before calculating differences
There are options that may pre-process compared files before Kdiff3 actually do a comparison - to ignore for example automatically generated dates and/or revision numbers added by commit hooks.
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Top
Pro
Context menu shortcut
You can right-click a folder/file and the options: Save <file> for later Compare with will be available, making launching KDiff3 really convenient.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows, Linux, Mac
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Experiences
Free
496
68
P4Merge
All
7
Experiences
Pros
5
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Pro
Free
P4Merge is free of charge.
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Top
Con
Directory comparison is not supported
With P4Merge it's impossible to compare two different directories to find differences.
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Top
Pro
3 way merge support
P4Merge presents merge information in 4 panes - BASE, LOCAL, REMOTE and MERGE_RESULT.
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Top
Pro
Detects minimal changes without having a common ancestor
After a merge sometimes you have conflicts. You can resolve them by using a merge tool. You can run git mergetool --tool-help to get more details about what tools are supported. You will get an output like the following git mergetool --tool=<tool> may be set to one of the following: p4merge tortoisemerge vimdiff vimdiff2 vimdiff3 The following tools are valid, but not currently available: araxis bc bc3 codecompare deltawalker diffmerge diffuse ecmerge emerge gvimdiff gvimdiff2 gvimdiff3 kdiff3 meld opendiff tkdiff winmerge xxdiff Some of the tools listed above only work in a windowed environment. If run in a terminal-only session, they will fail.
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Top
Pro
Also has image diffing
For those who are working in both text based source code or files, as well as images, its nice to have the diff functionality of both present in the same product.
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Top
Pro
Cross-platform with a good Mac port
P4Merge works on Windows, Linux and OS X.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows; Mac; Linux
License:
Free
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Experiences
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271
48
Beyond Compare
All
17
Experiences
Pros
13
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
Supports comparing folders
Beyond Compare can be used to compare both files and folders. File-Filters possible.
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Top
Con
No dark mode
Lack dark mode.
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Top
Pro
Supports 3 way merge
Good overview. Clear display of changed lines (background color) and changed characters (foreground color).
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Top
Con
No touch support
This is important for scrolling
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Top
Pro
Supports editing files directly
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Top
Con
Paid proprietary software
Beyond Compare is not free. It offers different license options depending on the number of members in a team and depending on the software version.
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Top
Pro
Has rules for adding ignore-masks and replacement rules
So parts you don't want to see in your comparision can be hidden with ignore masks. Parts that are okay to be changed can be set with change-lists so beyond compare knows what's the replacement value and skips displaying this. So you can focus on the for you important changes. For example with the ignore mask I was able to compare two logs with different timestamps but nearly same content. (beginning with timestams the first x characters adding to ignore)
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Top
Pro
Synchronize folders
Can be used to synchronize folders. Including wildcards.
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Top
Pro
Works well with large files
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Top
Pro
Can be used to compare image files
This is a useful feature for game developers using Git.
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Top
Pro
Opens popular archive formats as directories
Compare archive to directory or to another archive, update ZIP archives by copying files from other side or by editing them directly in compare view.
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Top
Pro
Can compare remote directories
Beyond Compare can compare directories through FTP, SFTP. Also it can compare directories hosted on Dropbox or Amazon S3.
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Top
Pro
One license covers all major OSs (Linux/Windows/Mac)
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Top
Pro
Customer Service is awesome and easy to work with
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Top
Pro
Has Registry compare
You can compare Registry vs Registry or Registry vs .REG file, both local and remote. You can copy values and keys between sides or edit them.
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Top
Pro
Has file conversion/preprocessing feature
You can run a script or executable based on file extension before showing a file. Great for beautifying XML, extracting text from MS Office documents, running dis-asm etc.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows; Mac; Linux
License:
Proprietary
Release Date:
October 19, 2023
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Experiences
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here
312
54
Sublimerge
All
10
Experiences
Pros
5
Cons
5
Top
Pro
Three-way diff allows easy merging of files
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Top
Con
Bad tech support
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Top
Pro
sublimerge
i recommend Sublimerge
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Top
Con
It's NOT Open Source
You can't fix or, implement nothing. And when the developer abandons the project you will be left in the lurch.
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Top
Pro
Highlights intraline changes
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Top
Con
It's not free
Nither as free price nor as free in freedom.
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Top
Pro
Built-in support for Git, Subversion and Mercurial commands
Sublimerge automatically integrates with your version control history, and lets you compare between revisions, branches, remotes, and the staging area.
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Top
Con
Cannot compare text within the same file
Sublimerge can only compare entire file diffs, but not two selections within a file. Comparing within files can be useful for example, by refactoring two similar functions to use a shared function. With Sublimerge, you need to copy the sections into two new temporary tabs and compare between the two. This can be cumbersome, as if you have another untitled file, you won't be able to know which one is which.
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Top
Pro
Can compare to clipboard contents
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Top
Con
No version control integration
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Experiences
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here
110
8
WinMerge
All
13
Experiences
Pros
9
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
Compare folders and files
Can show what files has been changed in a folder, allows comparing files in tabs.
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Top
Con
Windows only
It's only available for Windows. No Mac or Linux versions available. It is possible to run in Linux via WINE, although a bit unstable.
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Top
Pro
File edition
You can quickly copy changed lines (or files in folder comparison) in both directions with keyboard shortcuts. You can edit the files as well, with syntax highlighting of some languages.
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Top
Con
Development is spotty
The latest version (2.16.0) was released in November 2018. Before that the last official release was made in 2013. The 2.16.0 is actually one of the two forks (Winmerge-v2-jp) that were kept maintained throughout the years, it just got named as the official release. The other fork, WinMerge2011 is still being actively developed too. It's on par with the historical version, and has additional features such as showing only differences and a 64-bit version. An 'official' list of forks is maintained here.
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Top
Pro
In line comparison
Can show differences within a line.
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Top
Con
No 3-way merge
Cannot merge 3 files, can do only comparisons by pairs. Makes it unsuitable for merging operations, still useful to compare two versions in the history.
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Top
Pro
Free & Open source
Winmerge is a free and open source tool.
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Top
Pro
Good shell integration
Select two files and compare them. Alternatively, select one file, navigate elsewhere, select the other file to compare. Also supports drag'n'drop of files / folders from Explorer. History of past comparisons.
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Top
Pro
Lightweight, quick startup
Binary is less than 3 MB, so it starts quickly
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Top
Pro
Filters
Can filter out files for folder comparison, lines for file comparisons, with regular expressions. Options also allow to ignore whitespace differences, white lines, case change, line-ending changes, etc.
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Top
Pro
Good navigation
Keyboard shortcuts (and toolbar buttons) to navigate to next (previous) difference, side panel shows a map of the files with changed lines and allows to jump to a given place.
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Top
Pro
Good detection of moved lines
Detects when a block of lines has been moved in the file and shows the relation.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows
License:
Free and Open Source
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Experiences
Free
111
29
Kaleidoscope
All
7
Experiences
Pros
4
Cons
2
Specs
Top
Con
Mac OS only
Kaleidoscope is a Mac OS X only app.
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Top
Pro
Simple UI
Kaleidoscope has a beautiful and simple UI. It displays the two files that are being compared side to side, highlighting all the differences in a way that's easy to understand.
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Top
Con
Paid software
Kaleidoscope is not free, costing $69.99.
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Top
Pro
Diff within a line
When working in code, line-by-line diff can still be hard to spot small changes within the line. Kaleidoscope will highlight what has changed.
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Top
Pro
Supports comparing folders
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Top
Pro
Image difference viewer
Kaleidoscope supports image diff viewer in addition to git diff. It's able to find even the slightest changes between two versions of the same image.
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Specs
Platforms:
Mac
License:
Proprietary
Pricing Model:
Subscription ($8/month)
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Experiences
$69.99
52
25
CodeCompare
All
11
Experiences
Pros
6
Cons
4
Specs
Top
Con
No longer supported
Problematic with Visual Studio 2022. Semantic code comparison (its main selling point) does not support newer language variations.
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Top
Pro
Graphical showing of where code is added or removed
It does not add a blank line in the other code-pane to show where code was added or deleted. It simply draws a line to show point out its location.
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Top
Con
Does not support custom comment markings
Some compilers use ";" to specify in-line commenting. But as that is not a common method, all added comments are marked as new code. So it becomes difficult to find changes in the functionality of the code.
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Top
Pro
Three-way comparison and automatic merging
Three comparison panes with horizontal and vertical layouts Integrates with version control systems as the merging tool for conflicting file revisions Non-conflicting changes are merged automatically Merging conflicts are highlighted One-click conflict resolution with a mouse button
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Top
Con
Does not support move-detection
Very few programs detect move of blocks of code. Most just show deleted and added instead.
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Top
Pro
Supports comparing folders
Can diff entire folders.
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Top
Con
Free version is limited
Whereas there is a free version, it is missing a lot of great features that you're forced to pay for if you want.
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Top
Pro
Integrated into Visual Studio
Can be used either as a stand-alone product or as the built in diff/merge tool for Visual Studio.
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Top
Pro
Clear overview that marks only the changes, not every line with a change
Most compare tools mark every changed line with colour, making the code just a mess with thousands of coloured lines, while all that might be changed is a sign/character on each line. Code Compare draws boxes around each changed segment and highlights only the real change with a colour.
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Top
Pro
Offers free version and paid for version
You get a lot more if you pay for the pro version.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows
License:
FREE/$49,95
Dev platforms:
Windows
Structure Comparison:
C#, C++, JavaScript, Java, Visual Basic, XML
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Experiences
Free / paid
58
7
vimdiff
All
4
Experiences
Pros
3
Cons
1
Top
Pro
Mouse-free interface
It's practically vim, this means that the whole interface is mouse-free, this increases development speed significantly since you are only using the keyboard.
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Top
Con
Not for people who are not used to vim
Since this is basically a vim feature, it's clear that people who aren't used to vim and it's keyboard-based interface would find it very hard to work with vimdiff.
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Top
Pro
Lightweight
Since it's inside vim, it's very lightweight and fast. It fires up quickly and it does all operations painlessly.
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Top
Pro
Helpful to people who work a lot inside the terminal
Using command-line tools (vim/git) keep you stick in the terminal.
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97
13
Visual Studio Code
All
39
Experiences
Pros
24
Cons
14
Specs
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Integrated debugging
VSC includes debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript.
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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.
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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.
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Top
Con
Project search limits results
Because file search is so slow your results are limited in order to simulate a faster search.
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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.
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Top
Con
Very bad auto import
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Pro
Great performance
For a 'wrapped' web-based application, Visual Studio Code performs very well.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Libre/open source
Released under the MIT License.
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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)
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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.
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Top
Con
Poor error fix suggestions
Error detection and suggestions/fixes are poor compared to IntelliJ platforms
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Top
Pro
JavaScript IntelliSense support
JavaScript IntelliSense allows Visual Studio Code to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Embedded Git control
Visual Studio Code has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.
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Top
Con
Slow launch time
Slower than it's competitors, e.g. Sublime Text.
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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.
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Top
Con
Emmet plugin often fails on even simple p tags
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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.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Extensions (aka plugins) are written in JavaScript
Extensions are written in either Typescript or JavaScript.
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Top
Con
.sass linting is terrible
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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.
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Top
Con
Is not an IDE, is a text editor
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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.
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Pro
It has gotten really good
All it takes is one stop for all the features many people need.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Huge community behind it
The ease of getting assistance and finding tutorials is increasing as the community grows.
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Top
Pro
JS typechecking
It leverages TypeScript compiler functionality to statically type check JS (type inference, JSDoc types) with "javascript.implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true option.
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Top
Pro
Python support
Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension.
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Top
Pro
Good support for new Emmet syntax
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Top
Pro
High fidelity C# plugin
The Omnisharp plugin is very powerful providing full sln, csproj, and project.json support.
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Top
Pro
Support RTL languages
It supports pretty web rtl languages like arabic languages when most of other editors don't support it.
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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.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows, macOS, Linux
License:
MIT, Proprietary (official builds)
Multi Language Support:
Yes
Auto Complete:
Yes
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Experiences
FREE
4160
832
Kompare
All
4
Experiences
Pros
3
Specs
Top
Pro
Can create patch files
Kompare can create a patch file which lists the differences between two files. Patch files created this way are also compatible with the patch files created by the CLI diff utility.
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Top
Pro
Supports comparing directories
Kompare can compare both files and directories.
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Top
Pro
Configurable hotkeys
Because it's a KDE app, all the hotkeys are configurable
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Specs
Platforms:
Linux
License:
Free and Open Source
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here
9
1
Sublime Merge
All
13
Experiences
Pros
11
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Pro
Pure Git behind the scenes
All actions are real Git actions which minimizes confusion and makes it perfect for beginners and professionals alike.
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Top
Con
Too expensive
And they're continuing to increase the price over the time, from the $60 that was at the start.
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Top
Pro
Speed
Nothing is faster. I used to use Gitkraken, but on large projects Gitkraken is barely usable.
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Top
Pro
Very keyboard friendly
All actions have either direct hotkeys or corresponding entries in the palette (same as Sublime Text). This means a very streamlined and fast usage.
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Top
Pro
No account info needed
No account- or server checkbacks (only for updates). All password handling is pure Git which means much less trouble and confusion.
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Top
Pro
Portable version
Windows portable version.
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Top
Pro
"Native" performance (Python based)
Very good performance.
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Top
Pro
Using the trial version forever without limitations
Sublime Merge may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however, a license must be purchased for continued use. There is no enforced time limit for the evaluation.
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Pro
Lifetime testing
The product is paid but you can test for your life without paying (similar to sublime text).
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Pro
Excellent user interface
The user interface is designed excellently, and it's really fast to navigate with mouse or keyboard. It's never obscured which git commands are used, and commands can be modified/extended if desired. The visual appearance of the interface can be changed via themes, new git commands can be added, and even the menus can be extended.
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Top
Pro
Not subscription based
A license gives you 3 years of updates, and you can use the product after that indefinitely.
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Top
Pro
Bundled license available with Sublime Text (which is an amazing text editor)
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows, Linux, Mac
Features:
Line Staging, Syntax Highlighting, Image Diffs, Merge Tool, Git Flow Integration, Submodule Management, Themes, Custom Commands
Pricing:
FREE evaluation without time limit, $99 for personal license (including updates for 3 years), $75 per seat and year for business license, $168 for personal license bundle including Sublime Text (3 years of updates)
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Experiences
Free/$99
42
6
IntelliJ IDEA
All
25
Experiences
Pros
16
Cons
8
Specs
Top
Pro
Smart refactorings
IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a variety of features to make this possible for a variety of languages. These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates.
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Top
Con
Slow startup
Startup can be slow depending on system configuration.
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Top
Pro
Fast and smart contextual assistance
Uses a fast indexing technique to provide contextual hints (auto-completion, available object members, import suggestions). On-the-fly code analysis to detect errors and propose refactorization.
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Top
Con
Uses a lot of RAM
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Top
Pro
Android support, JavaEE support, etc
A very complete development environment support.
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Con
Somewhat expensive
IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year. However there is a free community edition available.
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Top
Pro
Support for many languages
IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc.
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Con
Built with closed source components
The version with full features is not opensource. Parts of the code are under apache licence though.
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Top
Pro
Lots of plugins
Many plugins are available for almost any task a developer may need to cover. Plugins are developed by Jetbrains themselves or by 3rd parties through the SDK available for writing them.
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Top
Con
Cannot open multiple projects in the same window
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Pro
Stable and robust
IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness.
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Top
Con
Lack of plugins
IntelliJ supports a very small amount of plugins. Although these are 'quality approved', many features are missing and can't be implemented because of that.
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Pro
Intuitive and slick UI
IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme).
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Top
Con
Bugs are not solved as often as they should
They are more interested in adding new features or issuing new versions than solving bugs.
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Pro
Clear and detailed documentation
The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded.
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Top
Con
Standard hotkeys behave differently
Seems like hotkeys assignment in Idea has no logical consistency. Like «F3» is usually next match, «Ctrl+W» - close tab, etc — they map to some different action by default. There is a good effort in making the IDE friendly for immigrants from other products: there are options to use hotkeys from Eclipse, and even emacs. But these mappings are very incomplete. And help pages do not take this remapping into account, rather mentioning the standard hotkeys. So, people coming from other IDEs/editors are doomed to using mouse and context menus (which are rather big and complex).
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Top
Pro
Very powerful debugger
With ability to step into a certain part of a large method invocation (Shift+F7), drop frame, executing code snippets, showing method return values, etc.
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Top
Pro
Free version available
There is a free community edition (open source) and an ultimate edition, which you can compare here. The ultimate edition is available for free for one year for students but must be registered through an .edu e-mail account.
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Pro
Many convenient features
These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it.
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Pro
Gradle support
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Pro
Built-in Git support
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Pro
Student Benefits
Verify yourselves as a student to get more perks.
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Pro
Embedded database support
Creating an embedded database, running SQL script in a dedicated terminal, viewing tables and their contents, and creating a connection to an in-memory or embedded database is fully supported.
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Pro
Prices are not bad
I pay $24 a month and i have access to all jetbrain peoducts , so i use their many tools , i tried many others like netbeans , eclipse , etc , they re good but intelij is on the space and the sky is the limit . Been using it for 5 years and i cant tell i got frustrated using .it
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Platforms:
Windows, Linux, Mac
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713
124
Vim
All
46
Experiences
Pros
30
Cons
15
Specs
Top
Pro
Lightweight and fast
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.
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Con
High effort to customize
A lot of time and effort is put in to make it specific to your needs.
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Pro
Free and open-source software
Vim is open-source, GPL-compatible charityware.
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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.
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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.
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Con
Difficult to copy, paste, and delete
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Con
Outdated UI
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Pro
Vimtutor
Vimtutor is an excellent interactive tutorial for people with no prior experience of Vim. It takes about 30 minutes to complete.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Con
Unintuitive mode switching
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Pro
Has been supported for a long time
And will be supported for many years to come.
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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.
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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.
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Con
Works poorly out of the box with right-to-left
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Pro
By default in Linux
All Linux distributions out there will have Vim built into them, which is highly convenient!
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Pro
Vim encourages discipline
If you use Vim long enough, it will rewire your brain to be more efficient.
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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.
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Pro
Donations and support to Vim.org helps children in Uganda through ICCF Holland
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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.
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Pro
If you can use Vim you can also use vi
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Pro
Works on Android
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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.
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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.
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Pro
Can set up keymapping
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Pro
Multiple clipboards
It is called "registers".
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Pro
Status Booster
Using vim not just increase your productivity, but helps you flex.
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Specs
Platforms:
Linux, macOS, Windows, Cygwin
License:
Vim License
Price:
0
Extension language:
Vim
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2402
445
QtCreator/Qt
All
5
Experiences
Pros
3
Cons
2
Top
Pro
Visual GUI designer
QtCreator has QtDesigner component, allowing you to design a GUI in visual mode instead of raw code.
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Con
Vendor lock on QtCreator
It's not simple at all to use Qt in a different IDE, and you'll lose QtDesigner.
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Pro
Ready-made classes for most used tasks in desktop app development
Launching external applications, getting environment variables, putting tasks to separate threads, offscreen painting, transparent loading of most used image formats, even such helpers as opening files in default application configured in OS, cross-platform (!).
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Con
Big overhead
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Pro
Cross platform
Qt supports most popular platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. This allows developers to easily port applications to different platforms.
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6
0
BBEdit
All
10
Experiences
Pros
7
Cons
2
Specs
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.
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Con
Featureless
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Pro
Can open very large files
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Con
Expensive
It's US$49.99 a single user license.
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Pro
Just about every feature is already built in
No searching for plug-ins that may or may not work.
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Pro
Great customer support
The developer is very responsive to bug reports and feature suggestions.
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Pro
Native application
Follows platform standards.
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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).
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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.
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Specs
Platforms:
Mac
License:
Proprietary
Collaborative editing:
No
Supported remote file editing protocols:
Yes
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57
9
DeltaWalker
All
8
Experiences
Pros
5
Cons
2
Specs
Top
Pro
Folder and file filtering
Easy to use rules for including or excluding folders and files from your folder comparisons.
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Con
Very slow
Folder comparisons can take an extremely long time to load compared to other diff tools.
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Pro
Cross platform
Works on Mac, Windows and Linux.
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Con
Can't save sessions
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Pro
Image comparison
2 & 3-way image comparisons with zooming & panning are available.
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Pro
3-Way Text Merge
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Pro
Can compare remote directories
Can connect to remote folders via FTP, SFTP, FTPS, WebDAV, WebDAVS, Dropbox, and Google Drive.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows, Mac, Linux
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Experiences
$39-89
5
1
GNU Diffutils (diff)
All
4
Experiences
Pros
4
Top
Pro
Command Line Interface makes it easy to use for people who work a lot in the terminal
Great for creating patch files, using with other *nix utilities (for example, colordiff). Does not require a GUI.
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Pro
Creates patches
These patches can be used to apply the differences to the same source file at a different storage location (different folder, different machine).
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Pro
Multiple formats
The difference can be output in formats known as normal, unified, ed, rcs, and side-by-side.
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Pro
Compares entiry directory trees
Two directory trees can be compared file by file recursively. All differences are output concisely.
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here
9
2
Magit
All
11
Experiences
Pros
9
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Con
Useful only for people who use Emacs
Magit is only useful if your text editor of choice is Emacs. It wouldn't really make any sense to open up emacs just to run Magit if you use another editor.
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Pro
Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks
Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor.
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Pro
Diffs are easy
Since it's integrated with Emacs, diffs are very easy to fix. You can jump right to any file you want to fix as soon as it comes up in the logs or in the status view.
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Pro
Easy to remember mnemonics
You can easily learn the mnemonics for the most common tasks and use them to your advantage to speed up your workflow.
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Pro
Better visualization and interactive workflow
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Pro
Stage hunks or even just parts of a hunk using a single key press
In Magit staging a hunk or even just part of a hunk is very easy. Magit also implements several other "apply variants" in addition to staging and unstaging. For example: you can also discard or reverse a change, or apply it to the working tree.
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Pro
Blame information can be viewed inline with the file
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Pro
Multiple buffers are used to show contextual information
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Pro
Powerful rebasing
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Pro
Available in Homebrew
brew install magit
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Specs
Platforms:
Any supported by Emacs (Linux, Windows,macOS,*BSD...)
License:
GPLv3
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Experiences
Free
134
20
Intellij IDEA
All
17
Experiences
Pros
11
Cons
5
Specs
Top
Pro
Free version available
There is a free community edition (open source) and an ultimate edition, which you can compare here. The ultimate edition is available for free for one year for students but must be registered through an .edu e-mail account.
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Top
Con
Bugs are not solved as often as they should
They are more interested in adding new features or issuing new versions than solving bugs.
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Top
Pro
Fast and smart contextual assistance
Uses a fast indexing technique to provide contextual hints (auto-completion, available object members, import suggestions). On-the-fly code analysis to detect errors and propose refactorization.
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Con
Somewhat expensive
IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year. However there is a free community edition available.
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Pro
Intuitive and slick UI
IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme).
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Con
Built with closed source components
The version with full features is not opensource. Parts of the code are under apache licence though.
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Pro
Stable and robust
IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness.
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Con
Lack of plugins
IntelliJ supports a very small amount of plugins. Althrough thesse are 'quality approved', many features are missing and can't be implemented because of that.
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Pro
Support for many languages
IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc...
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Con
Standard hotkeys behave differently
Seems like hotkeys assignment in Idea has no logical consistency. Like «F3» is usually next match, «Ctrl+W» - close tab, etc — they map to some different action by default. There is a good effort in making the IDE friendly for immigrants from other products: there are options to use hotkeys from Eclipse, and even emacs. But these mappings are very incomplete. And help pages do not take this remapping into account, rather mentioning the standard hotkeys. So, people coming from other IDEs/editors are doomed to using mouse and context menus (which are rather big and complex).
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Pro
Smart refactorings
IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a variety of features to make this possible for a variety of languages. These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates.
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Pro
Lots of plugins
Many plugins are available for almost any task a developer may need to cover. Plugins are developed by Jetbrains themselves or by 3rd parties through the SDK available for writing them.
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Pro
Android support, JavaEE support, etc
A very complete development environment support.
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Pro
Clear and detailed documentation
The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded.
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Pro
Very powerful debugger
With ability to step into a certain part of a large method invocation (Shift+F7), drop frame, executing code snippets, showing method return values, etc.
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Pro
Many convenient features
These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it.
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Specs
License:
Apache 2.0
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