SciTE vs MacVim

It's property files allow for fine tweaks of its behavior, at a global or per language / project level. These textual settings might be confusing for those used to preference dialogs, but prove to be powerful, flexible, and fine grained.

With less than 2 MB of binary on Windows, SciTE starts instantly. Plus, if you don't need all the config, syntax files, blah, there's a 678k standalone .exe version. Nothing is going to beat that for lightweight and start-up times. Stick it in a folder that is already on your PATH.

Based on the Scintilla source code editor, SciTE has some advanced features like rectangular editing, simple regular expression search and replace, code folding, etc. It allows the user to launch a compiler or interpreter, and it can also interpret the error messages, jumping at the location they point to.

Lua scripting is key to SciTE's power and flexibility. The Lua scripting language can be used to perform complex text transformations. It's relatively simple syntax and its large user-base makes it a great choice for a scripting feature.

The console window can show the result of ran commands (like build current file, reporting warnings, and errors), but also accept interactive shell commands.

SciTE works on Windows and Linux, and it also has a commercial port on MacOS.

Lexers providing folding and syntax highlighting are based on code, not on regular expressions. They support context, nesting, special rules, etc.

SciTE is written in C++, with lot of contributors, both to the core and to the numerous lexers.

Has a simple graphical user interface

Every plugin available for Vim is available for MacVim too.

MacVim is Vim, meaning it has all of Vim's customizability and power.

MacVim supports OSX's native shortcuts making the adoption of Vim easier.

MacVim, like Vim itself has a large community backing it.

In cases of a selected font missing certain characters, MacVim will find a font that has that character.

Vimtutor is an excellent interactive tutorial for people with no prior experience of Vim. It's bundled with Vim and takes about 30 minutes to complete.

Vim associates keys with words. For example, d is for "delete" and w is for "word". To perform an action you string together letters. Thus, to delete a word, press dw.

This way it's possible to abstract a large amount of functionality that Vim provides in an intuitive way.

Interaction with Vim is centered around several modes. Each mode has a different purpose and switching between them changes behaviour and keybindings. There are 12 modes in total (six basic modes and six variations on basic modes) and four of them are used commonly.

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.

Modes allow separating concerns between various tasks and reusing keys for different kinds of functionality. As a result, the workflow becomes more efficient.

Permits writing characters that don't fit in one byte, most notably logograms (for writing in languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) and Unicode characters.