When comparing Yi vs pico, the Slant community recommends Yi for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal text editors?” Yi is ranked 11th while pico is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Yi is:
Yi has default configurations for Vim, Emacs, as well as CUA. It also makes several improvements that includes Sublime-like (multiple) cursors.
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Pros
Pro Combines and improves upon the best text-editing features from your favorite editors
Yi has default configurations for Vim, Emacs, as well as CUA. It also makes several improvements that includes Sublime-like (multiple) cursors.
Pro More performant than Vim
Vim can be rather slow due the age of its code base. In particular, running large macros in Vim can be rather painful. Since Yi is being built from scratch it has been engineered for performance and with the benefit of hindsight.
Pro Extensible and modular editing features
As far as extensibility goes, Yi easily outstrips any other open-source text editor. Motions can be built from parser combinators, making them simultaneously flexible and modular - an open source hacker's dream.
Pro Plugins work together
Packages work together because they compile together.
Pro Built-in cheat sheet for shortcuts
All command characters are shown at the bottom of the editor.
Pro Easy to use
Pico includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to edit documents making it very simple.
Cons
Con Very few plugins available
Even though Yi is a general purpose text editor similar to Vim and Emacs, almost all of the plugins that have been written for Yi so far focus on supporting Haskell as a programming environment.
Con No way to reuse your existing customizations and keybindings
If you have spent years crafting your .vimrc
or .emacs
, there's no way to reuse it in Yi. You have to start from scratch.
Con Requires Haskell to compile and configure
GHC + Haskell packages makes for a rather large installation, which is a big ask for a relatively obscure terminal editor.
Con No way to override command characters
Characters such as ^D, ^T, ^L, etc will always be interpreted as commands and there's no way to write them in text.
Con Lacks some commonly expected functionality even for a basic editor
Pico lacks search and replace functionality as well as the ability to work work with multiple files at the same time.