MacVim vs Alfred

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.

Allows the creation of automated workflows by connecting keywords, hotkeys and actions together without writing code.

You can do everything using just the keyboard.

Alfred is able to handle simple mathematical commands and more extensive expressions alike. Pressing Enter copies the result to the clipboard.

Alfred allows getting secure and fast access to your 1Password 1Click bookmarks.

Alfred is a lightweight application for OS X and runs smoothly, even on older devices.

Quickly search for files, applications and web services from the same input.

Helps speed up your working day one shortcut at a time.

Alfred offers a clipboard with an extensive history for quick access to your copied text, images and links.

Alfred allows adjusting colors, fonts, sizes and more to create new themes.

The paid version is more customizable, but the free version is still very powerful.