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Add to SafariWhen comparing MacVim vs Codiad, the Slant community recommends MacVim for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” MacVim is ranked 13th while Codiad is ranked 64th. The most important reason people chose MacVim is:
Every plugin available for Vim is available for MacVim too.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Lots of plugins
Every plugin available for Vim is available for MacVim too.
Pro Extremely customizable
MacVim is Vim, meaning it has all of Vim's customizability and power.
Pro OS X input methods
MacVim supports OSX's native shortcuts making the adoption of Vim easier.
Pro Extensive community support
MacVim, like Vim itself has a large community backing it.
Pro Automatic font substitution
In cases of a selected font missing certain characters, MacVim will find a font that has that character.
Pro Vimtutor teaches the basics of Vim in 30 minutes
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.
Pro Everything is a mnemonic
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.
Pro Enables effective keyboard-driven editing due to its modal nature
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.
Pro Multi-byte support
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.
Pro Open source
You can run Codiad on your server to allow you and your team to edit files.
Simplest to run may be using a Docker image like linuxserver/codiad.
Pro Easy to self-host: Only requires PHP
It only requires PHP 5+ and Nginx or Apache. No database is required. This makes it really easy to install on many servers include shared hosting.
Pro Multi-line edit
Allows to edit multiple things are once by having multiple cursors like Sublime Text.
Pro Has many easily installable plugins
Many plugins exist, from Terminal, Git to Collaboration and Emmet... Plugins can be installed by using the web interface, or by manually extracting files to the right directory.
Pro Simple and easily managable GUI
Cons
Con Slow when opening files with very long lines
A lot of very long lines can make MacVim take up to a minute to open, where a few other editors take only a few seconds to load the same file.
Con Only available on macOS
A decent text editor is available on all major platforms (macOS, Linux, Windows).
Con Difficult learning curve
MacVim after all is still Vim, and with that comes the complexity that Vim brings and the difficult learning curve that needs to be overcome.
Con Terminal runs as same user for everyone
No matter who is the logged in user, the Terminal plugin runs commands as the PHP user. This also affects the Git plugin in that there is a single SSH key for all users using your Codiad instance.
Con Full of small bugs
There are plenty of various issues and bug that may either be due to your setup and the UI will not report them, or due to bugs in the code; I'm including common plugins here as well (just naming a few: search files and in files may report nothing if it had an error, commands stderr not printed, marketplace not showing items, search in market place showing no results, Git escaping ( by \( in the commit message for no good reason...). Those are generally small but together it makes the product feel flawed.
Con Currently no search and replace in multiple files
There is a search in multiple files, and search & replace in current file, but not something to perform a search & replace in multiple files.
Con Terminal doesn't TTY
The terminal plugin for Codiad allows users to type some commands and see the outputs, but not interactive input is supported (i.e. stdin is closed). Meaning you cannot run Vim, Tmux or anything requiring user inputs.
Con Demo only lasts 30min
