Emacs vs Neovim

Emacs can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. While true, I often find the mouse and menus handy for those lesser-used commands. An aide-memoir.

Customizations can be made to a wide range of Emacs' functions through a Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). A robust list of existing Lisp extensions include the practical (git integration, syntax highlighting, etc) to the utilitarian (calculators, calendars) to the sublime (chess, Eliza).

You can debug, compile, manage files, integrate with version control systems, etc. All through the various plugins that can be installed.

You can use Emacs' command line interface or graphical user interface.

Emacs has extensive help support built-in as well as a tutorial accessed with C-h t.

Licensed under GNU GPL.

With 30+ years of use the Emacs documentation is very thorough. There are also a lot of tutorials and guides written by third parties.

Evil mode emulates vim behaviors within Emacs. It enables Vi users to move inside the Emacs universe.

Advanced planning and publication which can start as a simple list.

Through its programmability, a very broad range of functionalities can be integrated in emacs, turning it even into a "single point of contact" with the underlying operating system.

Works on Linux, Windows, Macintosh, BSD, and others.

You can jump straight from your org-mode files to programming tasks - and back - and build a seamless workflow.

Emacs is great for everything.

You can pass complicated arguments in the mini buffer.

Fully compliant GNU-emacs is available on many platforms, and they all understand .emacs configuration files.

Emacs can select rectangularly.

With lisp customization, any behavior of Emacs can be changed. Update with pre-release patch can be also applied without recompiling the whole Emacs.

Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It provides Vim features like Visual selection and text objects.

Dynamic word completion.

Review the "Emacs Rocks" video.

The first verion of Emacs was written in 1974 and GNU Emacs in 1984.

Powerful commands, search, and more with the Helm plugin.

Since version 25 you can run GTK widgets inside Emacs buffers. One of these is the WebKitGTK+, which allows the user to run a full-featured web browser inside Emacs with JavaScript and CSS support among other things.

The tutorial you are presented with at startup shows you exactly what you need to get started and teaches you how to use the built-in help yourself later.

Emacs has a number of shell variants: ansi-term, shell, and eshell.

Complex git history editing become a breeze with very few keystrokes. And simple ones are quickly stashed in muscle memory. Git becomes an direct extension of your brain thanks to Magit. Cherrypicking, blaming, resetting, interactive rebasing, line level commit, spinoff branches... you name it, magit already has it and has typically all those 5 to 10 git CLI commands of higher-level patterns also tide to one simple shortcut (want to amend a commit three commits away ? forgot to branch out and you've got already N commits on master ? ... etc... ).

Managing several large mailing lists has never been easier using Gnus. The threading commands and the various ways of scoring articles means that I never miss important messages/authors, etc. A joy to use.

You can use the underlying operating system shell as a terminal emulation in an Emacs buffer. Don't like the default shell for your configuration? You can change it to your liking.

Built-in packages make editing Lisp source code feel natural.

Missing some neural package that predicts actions, maybe in the next release ...

NeoVim was a complete rewrite of Vim, with new features added and underlying issues resolved thanks to the Vim code base. The keybindings and configuration are the same as Vim, so the switch can be pretty simple.

The core text editor is "headless", meaning it's detached from the user-interface so other programs can hook into it. This enables better integration with IDEs and browsers, where "Vim mode" has typically been a poor substitute because it was a partial rewrite or a partial port at best. One of the advantages of Vim has always been ubiquity and Neovim makes it even more ubiquitous.

Vim plugins have always been useful, but tied to specific languages. Neovim's architecture provides better separation between plugins and the core product, so that plugins are completely flexible and can be written in any language.

This avoids the user having to make any installations.

The core functionality is handled apart from the UI, meaning that Neovim can be embedded into any other GUI system, such as Atom.

Not many editors can open such a large text file so quickly.

New neovim editor instance starts instantly and you can have multiple editors open at the same time, because id does not require a lot of memory to run.

Don't believe it? Try typing vimtutor in your command line right now.

Neovim can work on terminal, on a remote server over ssh.

As a refactor over Vim, Neovim has greatly improved its code base. For example, some functionality is handled by libuv, the same code base that powers Node.js.

Some typical configurations most of VIM users make are default in Neovim.

Vim gets stronger every time command-line tools get stronger. This isn't even it's the final form.

I don't like having dotfiles or dotdirs in my homefolder unless they're needed. Configs should be in the .config dir in their respective folder.

This makes editing multiple files at once, moving code around so easy.