Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Evil VS Vim

Compare Evil VS Vim and see what are their differences

Evil logo Evil

The extensible vi layer for Emacs.

Vim logo Vim

Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing
  • Evil Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04
  • Vim Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23

Evil features and specs

  • Vim Emulation
    Evil provides a near-complete emulation of Vimโ€™s features within Emacs, allowing users who are familiar with Vim to transition without losing their preferred keybindings and workflow.
  • Customizability
    Evil allows users to customize their configurations extensively, combining the powerful text-editing capabilities of Vim with the customizability of Emacs.
  • Community Support
    Evil has a large and active community, providing a wealth of plugins and resources to enhance the text editing experience.
  • Mode Integration
    Evil integrates smoothly with various Emacs major and minor modes, allowing users to leverage the full functionality of Emacs alongside Vim's modal editing.

Possible disadvantages of Evil

  • Learning Curve
    For users unfamiliar with Vim, the modal editing approach can introduce a significant learning curve, particularly for those accustomed to traditional text editors.
  • Complex Configuration
    Configuring Evil to fully integrate with existing Emacs setups can be complex and time-consuming, especially when customizing keybindings and behaviors.
  • Performance
    In some cases, using Evil with certain Emacs configurations or plugins may lead to performance issues, such as lag or delayed responses.
  • Inconsistencies
    There might be inconsistencies between Evilโ€™s implementation of Vim features and the original, which could affect workflows for power users who rely on specific Vim functionalities.

Vim features and specs

  • Efficiency
    Once learned, Vim can significantly speed up text editing with its modal editing, keyboard shortcuts, and commands that allow for quick navigation and manipulation of text.
  • Lightweight
    Vim is a very lightweight editor, consuming minimal system resources, making it highly performant even on systems with lower specifications.
  • Customizability
    Vim is highly configurable and extensible through plugins and user-defined settings, allowing users to tailor the editor to their specific needs.
  • Ubiquity
    Vim is available on almost every Unix-like system and even on Windows, making it a ubiquitous tool that you can rely on being available in most environments.
  • Support for Multiple Programming Languages
    Vim supports a wide range of programming languages out of the box and offers syntax highlighting, which can be enhanced through plugins.
  • Powerful Search and Replace
    Vim offers robust searching and replacing functionalities, including support for regular expressions, which can be a powerful tool for developers.

Possible disadvantages of Vim

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Vim's modal editing and extensive set of commands can be daunting for new users, requiring significant time and effort to master.
  • Minimal Default Config
    The default configuration of Vim is quite minimalistic, which may necessitate additional setup and customization to meet modern development needs.
  • Limited GUI
    Vim primarily operates in a terminal, and while there are graphical variants like GVim, they are not as feature-rich or user-friendly as modern GUI editors.
  • Plugin Management
    While Vim is highly extensible, managing and configuring plugins can be cumbersome compared to more modern editors that offer integrated plugin management.
  • Inconsistent Behavior Across Platforms
    There may be inconsistencies in behavior or available features of Vim across different operating systems, which can complicate its use in certain environments.
  • Lack of Integrated Modern Features
    Vim lacks some modern IDE features like integrated debugging, advanced code introspection, and refined autocompletion, which often require third-party plugins to achieve.

Analysis of Vim

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Vim is a good text editor, especially for users who invest the time to learn its powerful commands and features. Its steep learning curve may be challenging initially, but once mastered, it significantly enhances productivity.

Why this product is good

  • Vim is considered a powerful text editor because of its efficiency and versatility. It offers extensive features, such as syntax highlighting, a robust plugin system, and support for numerous programming languages. Vim is highly configurable, enabling users to customize its environment to fit their needs. It is particularly appreciated for its speed and the ability to perform complex text manipulations using simple commands.

Recommended for

    Vim is recommended for programmers, developers, and system administrators who require a highly efficient and customizable text editing experience. It is especially useful for those who work extensively in terminal environments or need a quick, resource-light text editor for remote systems.

Evil videos

Evil - Season 1 Review [No Spoilers]

More videos:

  • Review - Evil Season 2 Finale Review! (Episode 13)
  • Review - Evil (CBS): Finale/Season 1 - TV Review

Vim videos

What Vim Is and Why You Should Learn It

More videos:

  • Review - JAC Vapour VIM Review - JAC does a side by side mod...
  • Review - Jac Vapour VIM - Quick Look

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Evil and Vim)
Text Editors
9 9%
91% 91
IDE
11 11%
89% 89
Software Development
10 10%
90% 90
Knowledge Management
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Evil and Vim

Evil Reviews

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Vim Reviews

Boost Your Productivity with These Top Text Editors and IDEs
Vim offers a variety of features like split windows, macros, and extensive customization options. It has a steep learning curve, but once you master it, youโ€™ll be amazed at the speed and productivity it brings to your coding workflow. Vim is a favorite among experienced developers who value speed and efficiency above all else.
Source: convesio.com
13 Best Text Editors to Speed up Your Workflow
Itโ€™s tough to say which developers would enjoy Vim as a text editor. Itโ€™s an old system with an outdated interface. Yet, it still has the charm and powerful feature-set that the average developer needs. I would recommend it to more advanced developers who enjoy using open source software and being a part of a communityโ€“like the one you can find behind Vim.
Source: kinsta.com
12 Best LaTeX Editors You Should Use
The entire installation process is perfectly documented on their Sourceforge page, which you must definitely pay a visit. There is another standalone Vim software, known as the gVim that brings a GUI-based interface to the Vim document editor. Vim-LaTeX has been developed specifically for the programmers and it is so highly configurable that it can function anyway, ranging...
Source: beebom.com
The Top 7 Notepad++ Alternatives for You
Vim is a totally free Notepad++ alternative. It is available to use on Windows, Mac and Linux computers and it is very powerful. I was able to customize Vim to get it to look and function just how I want it. There is really good help support with Vim so if you are new to programming it will get you through most issues.
10 Best Notepad++ Alternatives in 2020
Vim is an advanced text editor open source tool which is also considered to be an IDE in its way. This tool allows managing your text editing activities with vim editors and UNIX System which can be used on-premise or online.
Source: www.guru99.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Evil should be more popular than Vim. It has been mentiond 61 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Evil mentions (61)

  • Switching from the Mac port Build of Emacs to the Standard NS Build
    That said, the default for sis-context-hooks, which decides when it fires, is '(evil-insert-state-entry-hook), which assumes evil. If you don't use evil, this hook never gets called and it won't work, so you'll need to add hooks that match your own workflow. - Source: dev.to / 28 days ago
  • Creating an Emacs major mode - because why not?
    For multiple reasons, one of them just being curiosity, I started using Emacs. And before anyone wants to start waging the holy war of editors1, I'll put myself out there and pronounce that the one and only correct answer is: Emacs with EVIL (GitHub) mode. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Helix-gpui: helix gpui front end
    Emacs is whatever you want it to be, and it has wonderful modal editing packages such as evil-mode[1] - which surpasses the editing system from vi that it is based on - and Meow[2] 1. https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Packages that you would like to be in emacs core ?
    Since we already have vyper-mode, why not add Evil to the stack? Source: over 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Does anyone Lisp without Emacs?
    2 stripe blue belt here! I used to use Vim for everything other than Java development and have now adopted Emacs in the same way. I am using it for Clojure and Common Lisp development along with org mode, irc, rss, git and file management I started with Evil mode and then moved to Xah fly keys before sticking to the emacs bindings. Having the caps lock key bound to CTRL helped me a lot. I don't know if it makes... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
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Vim mentions (10)

  • regular Vim has lua?!
    Lua is quite small, encouraging distros to include it. The ubuntu gvim has, and the gvim AppImage linked from vim.org does. The default Makefile from github is set up to not include it, but you can uncomment one line there to get it. Source: over 3 years ago
  • is there a way to make highlighted text persistent after quit when using something like [match Search /\%'.line('.').'l/] ?
    I've not used vimwiki locally (tho I'm old enough to remember the Vim wiki on vim.org :), but I think what you are wanting to do is extend vimwiki's syntax file. I presume it installs one at $VIMRUNTIM/syntax or or ~/.vim/syntax. If this sounds right, then create a ~/.vim/after/syntax/vimwiki.vim file and place your match command in there. Then everytime you open a vimwiki file it should apply your... Source: over 3 years ago
  • vim.org - Is there a reason for this 1800s-esque design?
    Vim.org has 242k total visitors, tailwindcss.com has 4.4m, planetscale.com has 412k, jpl.nasa.gov has 2.6m, all built with Tailwind, all several years younger than Vim's website. Unnecessary comparison, unnecessary defence. It's a valuable tool, fine, but a complete disregard for anyone who doesn't love a crappy website and would like to navigate a website like a normal human is not something to be defended. Maybe... Source: almost 4 years ago
  • What is YOUR process of writing ?
    I write in Vim with some customizations in my vimrc to gear it more towards prose writing than code editing. It's not pretty, but Normal Mode and Ex commands are the most powerful text editing tools out there, so that means I spend less time on making corrections and other edits. Source: over 4 years ago
  • Why developers need to know about Vim
    If you are open minded and would like to try it out, click me for more information! Cheers. - Source: dev.to / over 4 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Evil and Vim, you can also consider the following products

Doom Emacs - Emacs configuration similar to Spacemacs but faster and lighter.

Sublime Text - Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose - any kind of text file. You'll love the slick user interface and extraordinary features. Fully customizable with macros, and syntax highlighting for most major languages.

Org mode - Org: an Emacs Mode for Notes, Planning, and Authoring

VS Code - Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft

Vim Adventures - Learning Vim while playing a game

GNU Emacs - GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editorโ€”and more.