Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Neovim vs Codiad, the Slant community recommends Neovim for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Neovim is ranked 1st while Codiad is ranked 64th. The most important reason people chose Neovim is:
NeoVim was a complete rewrite of Vim, with new features added and underlying issues resolved thanks to the Vim code base. The keybindings and configuration are the same as Vim, so the switch can be pretty simple.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Still Vim but with upgraded features and some issues fixed
NeoVim was a complete rewrite of Vim, with new features added and underlying issues resolved thanks to the Vim code base. The keybindings and configuration are the same as Vim, so the switch can be pretty simple.
Pro Better integration with external tools
The core text editor is "headless", meaning it's detached from the user-interface so other programs can hook into it. This enables better integration with IDEs and browsers, where "Vim mode" has typically been a poor substitute because it was a partial rewrite or a partial port at best. One of the advantages of Vim has always been ubiquity and Neovim makes it even more ubiquitous.
Pro Powerful plugin model
Vim plugins have always been useful, but tied to specific languages. Neovim's architecture provides better separation between plugins and the core product, so that plugins are completely flexible and can be written in any language.
Pro Built-in terminal emulator
This avoids the user having to make any installations.
Pro UI Agnostic
The core functionality is handled apart from the UI, meaning that Neovim can be embedded into any other GUI system, such as Atom.
Pro Async plugin execution
Pro Active development community
Pro Opens a 3Gig Text File in a few seconds
Not many editors can open such a large text file so quickly.
Pro Fast and light on memory usage
New neovim editor instance starts instantly and you can have multiple editors open at the same time, because id does not require a lot of memory to run.
Pro Easier to pick-up than ever
Don't believe it? Try typing vimtutor in your command line right now.
Pro Work in TUI (Text User Interface)
Neovim can work on terminal, on a remote server over ssh.
Pro Modern code base
As a refactor over Vim, Neovim has greatly improved its code base. For example, some functionality is handled by libuv, the same code base that powers Node.js.
Pro Comes with some good configurations out of the box
Some typical configurations most of VIM users make are default in Neovim.
Pro Even more powerful since 2019, because of additions such as vim-coc, TabNine, fzf, skim
Vim gets stronger every time command-line tools get stronger. This isn't even it's the final form.
Pro Config file is where it should be
I don't like having dotfiles or dotdirs in my homefolder unless they're needed. Configs should be in the .config dir in their respective folder.
Pro Built-in file-explorer and ability to make splits and edit multiple things simutaneously.
This makes editing multiple files at once, moving code around so easy.
Pro Treesitter and LSP
Pro Terminal mode is very convenient for testing code in a split window
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 Poor feature discoverability
Con High effort to customize
A lot of time and effort is put in to make it specific to your needs.
Con Requires Brain Mode Switching
When editing in vim, you have you use the vim keys; when editing in every other window on your PC, or in Word or Excel or other application, you need to use the standard system key combinations. Learning the vim combinations can actually make you SLOWER at everything else.
Con Consume brain energy for editing that should be used for logic
Text editing in vim can be great once you've learned it, but it requires thinking about combination of commands. In other editors, you don't have to think about how to delete this part of code. You just think about how to implement a feature, what is a good design for this code. Even after you get used to using vim, it still requires your brain for editing.
Con Ambiguity in extensive documentation
Con Limited cross platform support
Neovim is not available for many legacy platforms
Con Split the VIM community
Moolenaar to be blamed for. If he opened up the development for vim to other bright minds, no fork would have happened. As it is mostly compatible with vim, it is not such a big issue.
Con Poor support for external tooling
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
