Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

grep.app VS Vim

Compare grep.app VS Vim and see what are their differences

grep.app logo grep.app

grep.app searches code from over a half million public repositories on GitHub.

Vim logo Vim

Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing
  • grep.app Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-18
  • Vim Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23

grep.app features and specs

  • Fast Search
    grep.app provides a rapid search experience across a wide array of repositories, leveraging optimized algorithms for quick text retrieval.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    The platform offers a clean and intuitive interface, making it easy for users to navigate and perform searches efficiently even if they are new to the tool.
  • Extensive Repository Support
    grep.app supports searching through a vast number of code repositories, offering developers a comprehensive tool for finding code snippets and relevant information.
  • Regular Updates
    The service frequently updates its repository index, ensuring that users have access to the most recent and relevant code data.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source project, grep.app allows users to contribute to its development, fostering a community-driven approach to improving the tool.

Possible disadvantages of grep.app

  • Limited Scope
    grep.app focuses primarily on code repositories, which may not be useful for individuals seeking to search non-code content or specific file types outside its scope.
  • Internet Dependency
    The platform requires an internet connection to access its search features, which might be a limitation for users in areas with unstable internet connectivity.
  • Privacy Concerns
    As with any online search tool, there may be concerns regarding the privacy of search queries and how they are stored or used by the service.
  • Learning Curve
    While generally user-friendly, some users may experience a learning curve in leveraging advanced search functions without prior experience or documentation.
  • Resource Intensity
    Executing large or complex searches can be resource-intensive, potentially slowing down performance for larger queries or datasets.

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.

grep.app videos

Identify malware authors using grep.app

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 grep.app and Vim)
Git
100 100%
0% 0
Text Editors
0 0%
100% 100
Code Collaboration
100 100%
0% 0
IDE
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

grep.app 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, you’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
It’s tough to say which developers would enjoy Vim as a text editor. It’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 community–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, grep.app should be more popular than Vim. It has been mentiond 15 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.

grep.app mentions (15)

  • Ask HN: Little or even unknown website that you like to use?
    Https://grep.app - To search repos for patterns. I usually use it when I'm using an obscure or badly documented library. https://unicode.scarfboy.com/ - Unicode stuff. There are a lot of small Unicode tool sites. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Nginx Has Moved to GitHub
    There are some alternatives like https://grep.app or https://sourcegraph.com/search if you want fast live search, but at the end of the day these are generally expensive services to provide, especially for free anonymous users, so you should probably at least accept that service providers can and do change things like this. You can also run something like your own copy of Zoekt and then ingest repositories on... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Sourcegraph Went Dark
    Https://grep.app/ is another good one. Not sure how many repos they index though. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Code Finder – The ultimate search engine for GitHub repositories
    Https://grep.app/ is similar and seems to return results, but I have not compared it to native GitHub search. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • Ask HN: Grep.app Alternative?
    Https://grep.app/ has served me well for the last couple of years finding snippets for random APIs. But recently I found that certain strings from open-source projects suddenly yield no results. For example: VaultServiceTimeout from https://github.com/rajanadar/VaultSharp has no results for https://grep.app/search?q=VaultServiceTimeout. Is there some alternative service for this task that is up-to-date? - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year 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: about 2 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 2 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: over 2 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: about 3 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 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing grep.app and Vim, you can also consider the following products

Sourcegraph - Sourcegraph is a free, self-hosted code search and intelligence server that helps developers find, review, understand, and debug code. Use it with any Git code host for teams from 1 to 10,000+.

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

OpenGrok - OpenGrok is a fast and usable source code search and cross reference engine.

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.

searchcode - A source code search engine

Notepad++ - A free source code editor which supports several programming languages running under the MS Windows environment.