When comparing mcedit (Midnight Commander) vs Yi, the Slant community recommends mcedit (Midnight Commander) for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal text editors?” mcedit (Midnight Commander) is ranked 6th while Yi is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose mcedit (Midnight Commander) is:
I hate opening a text editor confident that I have the information I need to type in safely in my grey matter's working stack, only to abruptly realize I don't even remember why I opened the editor to begin with. Ctrl+O is my best friend, upgrades to savior if you're tired/inebriated..
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Ctrl+O hides the window so you can reference the terminal history from before you invoked it
I hate opening a text editor confident that I have the information I need to type in safely in my grey matter's working stack, only to abruptly realize I don't even remember why I opened the editor to begin with. Ctrl+O is my best friend, upgrades to savior if you're tired/inebriated..
Pro Part of the Midnight Commander installation
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.
Cons
Con Limited search capabilities
Con Strange selection handling
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.