Brackets vs MacVim

Brackets will automatically refresh the browser and load the latest saved version of a file open in the browser. This works with php as well. Editing a css will even highlight the tag that's currently being worked on. However, it only works with Chrome.

Brackets is easy on memory usage and it starts up quickly.

Brackets is entirely free and open source.

The functionality of Brackets can be extended via a simple-to-use extension manager. The extension manager also has a considerable number of extensions and themes.

A feature called "Quick Edit" allows the user to select a tag in (a html file, for example) and edit the associated style without switching over to the css document. It also supports SASS and LESS pre-processors.

Brackets is being actively maintained and developed.

Hovering over colors hex codes or image paths will pop up previews of corresponding colors and images.

Brackets supports drag and drop of text, as well as multi / rectangular selection.

The editor is built using html, css, and javascript, making it extendable by any front-end developer.

You can have your cursor independently on multiple lines and so creating templates and/or editing multiple things at once is really fast and easy.

Vim-style editing is already built in the text editor.

A default extension allows for the extraction of PSD resources, such as images and styles. There's good integration for placing extracted resources into source.

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.