MacVim vs Eclipse Che

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.

Built-in terminal with root access so you can make changes to your running machines. Being able to SSH into the workspace so you can use a desktop IDE is handy.

You can package up custom commands with your workspace and then use them (or share them) with everyone else.

You can choose from pre-configured environments for Java, Javascript, C++, PHP, C#, etc., or you can define your own by dropping in a Dockerfile - makes it easy for simple and complex projects.

Projects can be easily imported from any Git or Svn repository hosting service.

The workspace in Che includes project sources, IDE and the runtime. So if you hand your Che workspace definition to another user and they execute it they will get everything they need to build, run and debug the project.

Also the runtime is in a Docker container so it will work even if the second user is on a different OS than the original user who shared their workspace with them.

Che does a nice job to automatically map the service:port running in the Docker container (e.g. tomcat on 8080) to the Docker port it actually uses (something in the ephemeral range). You never need to figure that out - it's just made available when you run your server.