When comparing SlickEdit vs Yi, the Slant community recommends SlickEdit for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” SlickEdit is ranked 40th while Yi is ranked 44th. The most important reason people chose SlickEdit is:
The beautifier formats code as you type to help improve readability and consistency.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Built-in beautifier
The beautifier formats code as you type to help improve readability and consistency.
Pro Integrated debuggers for multiple languages
Integrated debuggers for GNU C++, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, and PHP.
Pro Compiler tools
Pro Third party tool integration
Pro Symbol analysis support
There are powerful symbol analysis features in SlickEdit, including context tagging and references.
Pro Extensive support for programming languages
SlickEdit supports over 50 programming languages on nine platforms.
Pro Over 13 emulations
Pro Easy access to XCode projects
SlickEdit opens XCode projects with no conversions needed.
Pro Easy access to Visual Studio workspace
SlickEdit opens Visual Studio workspace with no conversions needed.
Pro Popular version control system
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 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.