When comparing TextMate vs Yi, the Slant community recommends TextMate for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” TextMate is ranked 23rd while Yi is ranked 46th. The most important reason people chose TextMate is:
Textmate is open source and hosted on [GitHub](https://github.com/textmate/textmate).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
Textmate is open source and hosted on GitHub.
Pro Extensible
TextMate has an extensive library of plugins which can be further extended to make it even more powerful.
Pro Lightweight footprint
It's lightweight footprint makes it extremely fast to load and use.
Pro Multi line select and editing
Pro Snippets
Pro OS X only (native)
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 OS X only
TextMate is for OSX only.
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.