When comparing Editra vs Yi, the Slant community recommends Yi for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Yi is ranked 46th while Editra is ranked 73rd. The most important reason people chose Yi is:
Yi has default configurations for Vim, Emacs, as well as CUA. It also makes several improvements that includes Sublime-like (multiple) cursors.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very customizable
Pro Small and portable
Editra's small size makes it extremely fast and portable. It can be uploaded in a USB drive and be used on the go.
Pro Powerful
Editra can open more than 60 different types of source code, each with syntax highlighting and many other features. It also has many widgets that can be installed to make the user experience easier (you can download them from the main site).
Pro Cross-platform and open source
Editra can run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Its sources are easily available from the site.
Pro Simple
Editra has a simple and very customizable UI.
Pro Python IDE
It's written in Python and can also be used as a Python IDE. Just by extending it through the installation of additional features and widgets, Editra can become an IDE for any programming language it supports.
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Con UI is ugly and outdated
Editra's UI is rather ugly and outdated and the color scheme is not as sleek as the other options out there.
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.