Vim vs SourceTree
When comparing Vim vs SourceTree, the Slant community recommends SourceTree for most people. In the question“What are the best developer tools for Mac OSX?” SourceTree is ranked 10th while Vim is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose SourceTree is:
In addition to color-coded branches and icons that tell if a file has been added, removed or modified, SourceTree also displays the number of commits that are ahead and behind the remote branch.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Free and open-source software
Vim is open-source, GPL-compatible charityware.
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.
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.
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.
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 my ost of Vim's functionality accessible without frequent awkward finger reaches.
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.
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.

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

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.
Pro Has been supported for a long time
And will be supported for many years to come.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pro By default in Linux
All Linux distributions out there will have Vim built into them, which is highly convenient!
Pro Vim encourages discipline
If you use Vim long enough, it will rewire your brain to be more efficient.
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.
Pro Donations and support to Vim.org helps children in Uganda through ICCF Holland
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.
Pro If you can use Vim you can also use vi
Pro Works on Android
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.
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.
Pro Can set up keymapping
Pro Multiple clipboards
It is called "registers".
Pro Status Booster
Using vim not just increase your productivity, but helps you flex.
Pro Informative branch visualization
In addition to color-coded branches and icons that tell if a file has been added, removed or modified, SourceTree also displays the number of commits that are ahead and behind the remote branch.
Pro Comprehensive layout
SourceTree has three main repository views: file status, history, and search.
File status view shows status of currently selected repo. It's split into two areas - file list and diff-view.
History view tracks changes made to the currently selected repository. It's divided into three sections. The top section has a graph with progression of commits, branches, and merges. The bottom section shows commit details, files changed, and differences committed.
Search view allows looking up commit messages, users, files changes, branches, and commit SHA.
There's also a toolbar at the top that allows switching between the three views, as well as giving access to git commands (such as commit, checkout, reset, stash, add, remove, fetch, pull, push, branch, merge, and tag).
Pro Built-in Git-flow and Hg-flow support
Git-flow and Hg-flow provide a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects.
SourceTree allows setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model. Clicking the Git-flow / Hg-flow toolbar button will give you access to actions for starting or finishing features, releases or hotfixes depending on the current state of repository.
Pro Quick setup
Once installed, SourceTree will automatically try to look for and set up repos that are worked on. SourceTree will also detect if git-flow is used and what is the current development state as long as default git-flow branch names are used.
The software tracks all relevant repositories in the bookmark's window. Repositories can be added to the list by creating new ones, adding a local folder, supplying a clone URL or integrating with remote services such as Bitbucket or GitHub.
Pro Simple yet powerful
SourceTree allows you to do advanced Git operations while making them straight-forward for those who are still adjusting to Git.
Pro Allows chunks and lines selection during commit
SourceTree automatically splits the changes to be committed into chunks allowing committing (or discarding) each chunk separately. Furthermore, the user can even select specific lines. This greatly increases the flexibility of the user in that matter.
Pro Built-in integration with Stash and Bitbucket
Sourcetree integrates with repositories hosted on Bitbucket, Stash, GitHub, and Kiln.
Pro Free
Pro Supports Git LFS
Pro Git terminal
Comes with own built-in git terminal independent from other git installations and updated regularly. It's especially good for git beginners who would like to use advanced git functions, but are not ready yet.
Pro Supports Git, Mercurial, and Subversion
Allows managing Git & Mercurial repos side by side. It even allows Subversion interoperability via git-svn or hgsubversion plugins which set up a bridge between either Git and SVN or Mercurial and SVN respectively.
Cons
Con High effort to customize
A lot of time and effort is put in to make it specific to your needs.
Con Difficult learning curve
You'll spend a lot of time learning all the commands and modes supported in Vim. You'll then spend more time tuning settings to your needs. Although once it's tuned to your needs, you can take your .vimrc
to any machine you need and have the same experience across all your computers.
Con Difficult to copy, paste, and delete
Con Poor support for external tooling
Many plugins depend on optional Python and Lua features, which may or may not be included in whatever binaries are available for your system. And without platform-specific hacks, it is difficult for plugins to operate in the background or use external tooling.
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.
Con No smooth scrolling
Even with the GUI version, the lines jiggle line-by-line. If you are used to smooth scrolling, this is very annoying, especially when working with larger files.
Con Doesn't play nice with the system cut/paste mechanisms
This can be worked around somewhat if you disable mouse for insert mode. You can then right-click your terminal and use paste like you would anywhere else in a terminal.
But it still doesn't feel right when the rest of your system uses Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, and you have a system clipboard manager, and so forth.
Con Outdated UI
Con Requires Brain Mode Switching
When editing in vim, you have you use the vim keys; when editing in every other window on your PC, or in Word or Excel or other application, you need to use the standard system key combinations. Learning the vim combinations can actually make you SLOWER at everything else.
Con Slow when opening files with very long lines
A lot of very long lines can make Vim take up to a minute to open files, where a few other editors take only seconds to load the same file.
Con Consume brain energy for editing that should be used for logic
Text editing in vim is awesome, but it requires thinking about combination of commands. In other editors, you don't have to think about how to delete this part of code. You just think about how to implement a feature, what is a good design for this code. Even after you get used to using vim, it still requires your brain for editing.
Con Foreign keyboards have a hard time on Vim out of the box
A lot of frequently-used keybinds are way harder to access on foreign keyboards because they use different layouts.
For example, Germans use the QWERTZ layout, while French use the AZERTY.

Con Unintuitive mode switching
Con Extensibility isn't that great
While it has gotten better and some projects are slowly starting to build proper extension support, it still can't and by design never will achieve the extensibility of another editor like emacs.
Con Works poorly out of the box with right-to-left
Con Can sometimes be slow
Some operations can be slow. If you know what you want (e.g you want to touch a file, add it, commit it, and push it) you can do it much faster on the command line. However you're often not going to know what you want, so the visual diffs (for example) help massively.
Con Always slow
Con Requires an account to install and use
Need an Atlassian account to install.
Con Terrible for resolving merge conflicts
It's hard to tell when you are in a conflict state, let alone what to do if it happens.
Con Unstable and terrible UX
The Windows version of SourceTree is riddled with bugs, causing some users to find it unusable.
These include failing to refresh, frequent freezing, and slow performance. The recent redesign (February 2016) has made the UI difficult to navigate.
Con Requires users to be online when starting up
As of 2.3.5, it needs to dial home on every start-up, else it raises alerts to compliance.
Con DEPRECATED -No dark theme
Dark Theme is now available on Windows as well as the MacOS version.
Con Chews CPU
Con The UI of version 2.0+ is so terrible
Tab looks good if you have no more than five repos. If you have a lot, you will know my pain. The source tree will not remember the order of the tab you drag. Everytime you restart the app, it will go back to whatever it likes.
Con Does not allow offline installation
Upon installation, the splash screen prompts you to login. There used to be a workaround for you to manually deploy this application in an offline environment, but they've patched it as of 2.0.20.1. It now does a dial-home on each start-up. Since it cannot reach the server, it throws an error to the user, and raises alerts to compliance.
Atlassian's final decision was that they are not going to support this feature at all. Quoted from their staff:
"We’ve never officially supported any form of pre-installation on device management capabilities. [...] As you know, last year, we removed the notion licensing and asked our developers to register the product by creating an Atlassian account. That said, SourceTree has always been a tool for the individual (emphasis mine) developer."
Con Browsing folders is troublesome
Choosing files of specific folders for check-in is troublesome.
Con UI is buggy and getting worse with updates
UI elements have been critically broken over the last few updates--interactive rebase for example has been entirely nonfunctional for the last 3 versions--and from the JIRA tickets, it seems UI bugs are not being addressed or triaged.
With the declining stability and lack of QA for this product over the last 2-3years, SourceTree seems a risky choice for teams going forward.
Con Not even possible to change the password
There are tickets about this issue sitting there for years and marked as medium priority. I experienced this since version 1.8. Up until now, there has been no fix. If your company's policy is going to enforce you to change your password, it means you need to remove all the repos and clone them again everytime you change the password. This is the worst ever experience.
Con Varied speeds across different versions
For example, the Windows version is quite slow is comparison to the Mac version.
Con Poor UX for interactive rebase
The interactive rebase window is a pain to use, with poor UX, such as not refreshing the list once a change is made. It's a downgrade from git rebase --interactive
.
Con Not always recognizes changed files
Seems to not always recognize changed files, which means that they will not be pushed to remote origin either. This means if you switch branches, the files will be overwritten and you lose your progress. Very annoying.
Con CRLF on Windows is a nightmare
There is a bug in 'Discard hunk' and 'Discard lines' constantly interrupting the work flow with inserting wrong line endings. Click here for more details.
Con Has trouble with Github's Yubikey integration
When your 2FA is a hardware key, it is difficult to find a way to bring up the ability to use anything but a pre-programmed password function on the Yubikey, which doesn't add much to security all things considered what a hardware key is supposed to do.
Con Crashes frequently
Stops responding every 5 minutes.
Con Login problems
Frequently unable to log in, despite the correct password.
Con Uninstalling won't remove the installation completely
If You decide to uninstall, you'll have to manually go to the folder inside the system and directly delete the files. If you uninstalled to reinstall fresh, this is a big issue.
Con Can't select install location
You can't select the install location (anymore). This is terrible for enterprise environments. It insists to install into "Users/<Name>/AppData/Local". What? Where? Why not "Recycle Bin" or Windows Temp?
Con Often rebuilds the graph visually noisy
E.g. after a reset command, the graph disappears and reappears after a few moments.
Con Flawed installer
Enforced registration process doesn't work, shows failure when connected to Bitbucket. Windows are too small to display installation text and options. Installs unwanted icon on the desktop. Slow and unresponsive at times.
Con Blame MS Office's word correction dictionary to be the source of the slowness while it's not
It's so obvious that ever since 2.0, it will try refreshing each of the repo a few minutes. If you have a lot then it will drive you crazy. When you try to expand a branch node, it refreshes. Try again, OOPS, it refreshed again. Sometimes, it will take you five minutes to select the node you want.
Con Information density can be a bit much
It's possible to become overwhelmed with the information density presented in SourceTree. This is especially the case in history view, as it includes a lot of data presented in various ways.
Though this is great for getting a comprehensive overview of everything that's happening in one place, it can take some getting used to.
Con No auto stash
