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What are the best Elixir IDEs/editors?

10

Options
Considered

170

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Recs.

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Here’s the Deal

10 Options Considered

Best Elixir IDEs/editors	Price	Platforms	License
-- IntelliJ IDEA	Free/Paid	Windows, Linux, Mac	-
82 Spacemacs	-	Windows, macOS, Linux	-
-- Vim	-	Linux, macOS, Windows, Cygwin	Vim License
-- Visual Studio Code	FREE	Windows, macOS, Linux	MIT, Proprietary (official builds)
-- Emacs	-	Unix-like, Windows, Cygwin	GPL-2.0-only

IntelliJ IDEA

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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. See More

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. See More

Clinton's Experience

Lacks advanced macro capabilities and there is a bug deep within Java that causes IntelliJ to screw up my keyboard layout. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Intuitive and slick UI

IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme). See More

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. See More

ProfessionalHygieia's Experience

intelligent as it is named after See More

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. See More

Top Con

Somewhat expensive

IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year. However there is a free community edition available. See More

HappyAdrestia's Experience

SIMPLE THE BEST. See More

Top Pro

Smart refactorings

IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a variety of features to make this possible. These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates. See More

Top Con

Slow startup

Startup can be slow deepending on system configuration. See More

Top Pro

Clear and detailed documentation

The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded. See More

Top Pro

Many convenient features

These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it. See More

Top Pro

Android support, JavaEE support, etc

A very complete development environment support. See More

Top Pro

Buit-in Git support

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. See More

Top Pro

Stable and robust

IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness. See More

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. See More

Top Pro

Support for many languages

IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc. See More

Top Pro

Gradle support

Spacemacs

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Top Pro

Mnemonic and consistent key bindings

Key bindings are organized in mnemonic namespaces, for instance buffer actions are under b, file actions under f, project actions under p, search actions under s etc... Key bindings are consistent across the whole distribution thanks to a set of conventions. See More

Top Con

Not much velocity on the emacs-elixir mode

The github project of emacs-elixir is not very well maintained. See More

Clinton's Experience

Spacemacs is bloated and sluggish at times. Emacs keybindings also cause me RSI issues. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

Top Pro

Awesome out of the box Elixir support

Just add the Elixir option in your settings to get autocomplete on functions/modules, run iex in the editor (w/ or wo/ current project loaded), search or get help for item under cursor, and run tests. See More

Top Con

Buggy plugins

There are far too many broken/buggy/dead plugins in the Emacs package repository. The package system itself is also quite buggy and tends to hang Emacs. I haven't had that issue with either Vim or Kakoune. See More

AwesomestKui's Experience

I really want to like Emacs but most of the functionality seems crufty and unpolished, and many of the plugins are buggy and not being maintained. For example, if I install the adoc-mode module, it renders my asciidoc code in a way that is unreadable (it also throws an error due to the deprecated CL library being used). If I use the built-in terminal, Emacs cannot distinguish between me typing C-c C-c to close Elixir's iex REPL and Emacs commands, so I end up in a state where I have to quit and restart Emacs to resume working. Finally, the Emacs package manager hangs far too often, which requires me to completely kill Emacs and start again. Too many bits of Emacs are like this, giving Emacs a half-baked "alpha" quality. The bits that work are great. It's everything else that prevents me from making Emacs my main editor (I use Kakoune). See More

Top Pro

Combines the best parts of Vi and Emacs

Spacemacs combines the Emacs platform (with the full power of the Emacs plugin ecosystem) and the Vi keybindings in the same box. 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

TruthfulAequitas's Experience

It feels like it was built for Elixir 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 to easily manage configuration dependencies between hundreds of packages. 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

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 Con

Requires prior experience in Vim or Emacs

They have a very poor guide to new users who are not familiar with this type of editor. You should have experience using Vi(-m) or Emacs. Spacemacs is distributed based on Emacs, so you should learn the basic of Emacs. This is not a means to learn from the Emacs's original distribution(GNU Emacs) rather than Spacemacs. Although the advantages of Spacemacs can offset the fundamental difficulty of Emacs, it means that you have to learn another new features and modes beyond the Emacs. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

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

Great note-taking and agenda "app" built-in

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

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

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 at other times would become completely unresponsive. Restarting Spacemacs would always fix it for a while. It was just really unstable and this was only 6 months or so ago. May be fixed in newer versions. See More

Top Pro

Great support from the community

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

Top Pro

Use SPACE bar as leader

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

Top Pro

Above average documentation quality

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

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

Fast-paced development

New functionalities and fixes are added every day and release cycles are short. See More

Top Pro

Can work in terminal mode

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

Top Pro

Daemon support

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

Top Pro

Manage R files easily

Top Pro

Easily extended with community plugins

Top Pro

Great CFEngine support

Syntax highlighting and org-babel extensions. See More

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

Top Pro

Great Clojure support

Top Pro

Works well with Common Lisp

Top Pro

Manage many code bases easily

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

Remote file editing

Files can be edited in Spacemacs remotely. 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

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

LaTeX support

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

Vim

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Top Pro

Easier on the hands and fingers than Emacs

I've used Vim and Emacs extensively. While I like Emacs for all that it can do, the chording is tough on my hands and has caused me issues with RSIs. This isn't an issue for me in Vim, since its multi-mode model doesn't require complex chording. I know other developers who have experienced this as well. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Vim has a steep learning curve, and it takes some time to build up your muscle memory. However, once you've done so, you'll be hard pressed to find an editor that makes you more productive. See More

TruthfulAequitas's Experience

I never manage to set it up as good as Spacemacs works out of the box. See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux, macOS, Windows, Cygwin

License:Vim License

Extension language:Vim

Top Pro

Macros

Vim macros are powerful and make repetitive tasks a breeze. See More

Top Con

High effort to customize

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. 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 Pro

Great for 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 most of Vim's functionality accessible without frequent awkward finger reaches. See More

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

Multiple clipboards

They are 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

By default in Linux

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

Works on Android

Top Pro

Vim encourages discipline

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

Top Pro

If you can use Vim you can also use vi

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 most of Vim's functionality accessible without frequent awkward finger reaches. See More

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 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 Pro

Free and open-source software

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

Top Pro

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

Top Pro

Can set up keymapping

Top Pro

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

Visual Studio Code

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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

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

Clinton's Experience

Lacks advanced macro capabilities. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

License:MIT, Proprietary (official builds)

Extension language:JavaScript

Multi Language Support:Yes

Top Pro

Great performance

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

Damon Janis's Experience

I love the ElixirLS extension - you install it and immediately have all of the autocomplete / highlighting / debugging / error analysis your heart desires. I haven’t had nearly enough time yet in my career to invest in something lower level like Vim, and I’ve been thrilled by the bang for your buck you get with VS Code / ElixirLS. 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

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

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

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

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

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 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 Pro

Libre/open source

Released under the MIT License. See More

Emacs

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Top Pro

Has Alchemist

Elixir Tooling Integration into Emacs. See More

Top Con

Takes a lot of effort to configure to fit your needs

It definitely can be configured (and even programmed) according to anyone's habits, needs and preferences. For example, imagine a text editor which can handle typesetting and displaying English, Russian, Japanese and Sanskrit text, supporting LaTeX publishing workflow, Common Lisp development workflow, Javascript development workflow, writing down thoughts and to-do tasks and also having a full-featured command line. But you will to configure/program it, and it'll in no way be either fast or pleasurable. See More

Specs

Platforms:Unix-like, Windows, Cygwin

License:GPL-2.0-only

Extension language:Emacs Lisp, C(Emacs modules)

Multi Language Support:Yes

Top Pro

Elixir mode

Emacs provides dedicated mode for Elixir development. 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

Excellent Lisp editing support

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

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

Cross-platform

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

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

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

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

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

Ubiquity

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

Top Pro

Dabbrev-expand (Alt-/)

Dynamic word completion. See More

Top Pro

Free

Licensed under GNU GPL. See More

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 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 Pro

Self documenting

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

Top Pro

Keyboard-focused, mouse-free editing

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

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 Pro

Use-package and org-mode

Missing some neural package that predicts actions, maybe in the next release ... 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

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

Emacs provides magit, the best and most complete GIT interface

Complex git history editing become a breeze with very few keystrokes. And simple ones are quickly stashed in muscle memory. Git becomes an direct extension of your brain thanks to Magit. Cherrypicking, blaming, resetting, interactive rebasing, line level commit, spinoff branches... you name it, magit already has it and has typically all those 5 to 10 git CLI commands of higher-level patterns also tide to one simple shortcut (want to amend a commit three commits away ? forgot to branch out and you've got already N commits on master ? ... etc... ). 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

Customisation with Emacs Lisp

(Almost) everything is implemented in Emacs Lisp. You are the limit when it comes to changing or adding new functions to emacs. See More

Top Pro

Interactive Shells

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

Versatile

Emacs is great for everything. 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

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

Review the "Emacs Rocks" video. 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

Provides org-mode

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

Rectangular cut and paste

Emacs can select rectangularly. See More

Top Pro

Mini buffer

You can pass complicated arguments in the mini buffer. 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

Kakoune

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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

Clinton's Experience

I've been using Vim for 20+ years. I'm still learning Kakoune, but so far I'm impressed. Many of the features I have to rely on plugins for in Vim and built in to Kakoune. Creating plugins is easier in Kakoune than Vim. I also like the keybindings. They're enough like Vim that they're easy to pick up, but they're also more consistent. For example, in Vim, you hit "0" to jump to the very beginning of a line, "$" to jump to the end, "gg" to jump to the top and "G" to jump to the bottom. In Kakoune, you type "gh" to go to the beginning of a line, "gl" to go to the end, "gk" to go to the top of the buffer, and "gj" to go to the bottom. You can also type "gf" to open a file path, if your cursor is on one. The "g" is a goto command, and then you use the standard direction controls to move the cursor to the limits of that direction, which is a lot easier to remember for new users. I don't quite have Kakoune configured the way I want it yet, but I've seen enough good things in it that I'm willing to invest time to learn it. See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux, macOS, Android

License:Unlicense

Top Pro

Good UNIX citizen

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

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

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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

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Actively developed and supported

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More visual than Vim

Vim commands typically follow a verb/object pattern, meaning you tell Vim to delete and then define what should be deleted. In Kakoune, it's backwards. Kakoune follows an object/verb pattern, so you can select the object first, visually see what is selected to make sure it is exactly what you wanted to perform an action on, and then commit the action. See More

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Easy to create plugins

Creating plugins for Kakoune is easier than creating plugins for Vim. See More

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More modern than vim

PhpStorm

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Intelligent code completion

PhpStorm has two types of autocompletion: structural completion and word expansion. Structural autocompletion makes predictions based on its understanding of PHP, while the latter tries to predict the word currently being typed based on previously typed words. Word expansion also works in comments and docstrings and it's similar to vim's omnicompletion. Both types of autocompletion work extremely well, have little to no problems and are quite fast even when loading suggestions on the go. See More

Specs

Extension language:JVM

Multi Language Support:Yes

Auto Complete:Yes

Bracket Matching:Yes

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Supports various PHP frameworks

Supports Symfony2 (including Twig and Doctrine), Yii frameworks, and Laravel. See More

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PHPDoc support

PHPDoc is a documentation generator. It allows automatically generating documentation from specifically formatted comments. See More

Atom

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High memory usage

Atom has a relatively high memory usage. Especially compared to some other text editors not based on Electron. See More

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Extensive list of packages

Atom has a built-in package manager and an extensive list of packages. Packages are written in CoffeeScript. See More

Clinton's Experience

Atom is slow and cannot deal with large files. See More

Specs

Platforms:Microsoft Windows®, macOS, Linux

Extension language:JavaScript

Multi Language Support:Yes

Top Con

Slows down exponentially with plugins

Extending it needs sacrificing responsiveness See More

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Beginner friendly

One of the goals of Atom is to be a text editor for both experienced and beginner programmers. You can add keyboard shortcuts, change themes, install plugins, and change core settings by clicking through a GUI, or by manually editing config files the old fashioned way. It has the added advantage of being built using the same engine that powers Google Chrome, so actions like opening and closing tabs feel familiar even to new or non-programmers. See More

Top Con

Slow

Atom is not a native application. As such performance is subpar and the lag is especially noticeable on larger projects. It also opens a surprising amount of sub-processes and leaks a considerable amount of memory. See More

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Command line integration out of the box

Installing Atom adds two command line commands - atom and apm. The first one runs the application itself and the second one is the Atom Package Manager that's used to add and remove various components from the package listing. While these features can be set up with other editors as well, Atom takes care of them out of the box. See More

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Very slow startup time

Atom is very slow to startup, which is a big disadvantage if you are accustomed to using it to make quick changes on your files. See More

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Instant file switching

Ctrl or Command + T and using fuzzy search you can look for a file in your project. See More

Top Con

Has difficulty with large text files

Tends to crash or hang with large >(10MB) text files, making it less useful as a general text editor. See More

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Embedded Git control

Will highlight folders, files and lines that have any uncommitted edits made. It also integrates really well with GitHub. See More

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Built in package management

Atom was built from the ground up with the community in mind, and package management is a first class feature. See More

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Extendable

Due to its modular design almost any aspect of the editor can be changed. Even seemingly core packages like the one's taking care of search and replace functionality can be forked on GitHub, changed and replaced in the editor. The Documentation for creating new plugins is also great and thus it's easier for developers ti jump in and create plugins for Atom. See More

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Multi-line select and edit

Multiple cursors & column selection allow versatile ways of editing. ctrl + d will select the current word and each time the command is repeated add the next occurence of the word to the selection. ctrl + click or middle-mouse click will place another cursor in the place that's clicked. Cursors can then be controlled together. This also allows selecting vertically. See More

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Command Palette

The Command Palette allows fuzzy searching all available functions, settings, snippets, etc. See More

Nova

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CodeLobster IDE

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