When comparing Yi vs Textadept, the Slant community recommends Textadept for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Textadept is ranked 16th while Yi is ranked 46th. The most important reason people chose Textadept is:
Both text and GUI versions behave mostly the same, just the way notepad users would expect it to. Like shift+arrows - select, Ctrl+c - copy, Ctrl+o - open a file.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Has both GUI and TUI
Both text and GUI versions behave mostly the same, just the way notepad users would expect it to.
Like shift+arrows - select, Ctrl+c - copy, Ctrl+o - open a file.
Pro Cross-platform
It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Pro Small and portable
Has very few dependencies, and very small footprint. Can be copied to a new system in a moment, unpacked and be at your service.
Pro Scriptable
Has a built-in lua engine.
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 Community
Does not have an IRC channel or some kind of forum where a community of developers/plugin writers could evolve around. Has a mailing list which is said to be active but that does not feel that attractive.
