When comparing Geany vs Yi, the Slant community recommends Geany for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Geany is ranked 3rd while Yi is ranked 46th. The most important reason people chose Geany is:
Geany is very lightweight thanks to the smaller offering of features.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Light and fast
Geany is very lightweight thanks to the smaller offering of features.
Pro Built-in plugin manager
Geany has a built-in plugin manager which can be used to install plugins and add new powerful features to the editor.
Pro Quick search on large files
In Geany you technically search once for a whole search query, unlike Gedit, where once you start typing, the file is searched for in accordance with each substring of what you're typing, all the while leading to terribly annoying lag.
Pro Cross platform
Geany is a cross platform editor, very similar to Notepad++ in Windows.
Pro Build in terminal
Press F5 and code will run without the need to switch between windows.
Pro Actively developed Free (as in freedom) Software
This software respects your freedom.
Pro Real syntax parsing (not just coloring)
Hence it is capable of showing the methods and inner classes of, e.g., a Java source file.
Pro Simple project management
Pro Native
It is a real app and not another frankenstein web/electron app. This means it runs great and doesn't extraordinary amounts of RAM.
Pro Options in the menu are easy to find
For example, there is an easy way to change the font and theme in the View menu. No need to search through several syntax styles like in Notepad++ just to be able to change the used font.
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 Not very advanced
Although it has some IDE features, it is not as advanced as some other text editors that can be extended to contain IDE functionality.
Con Windows installer not digitally signed
Con Not many third-party plugins
Geany is not as popular as some other text editors with plugin support. As such it's understandable that it's missing lots of powerful plugins available in other editors.
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.