Software Alternatives & Reviews

MacVim VS Spacemacs

Compare MacVim VS Spacemacs and see what are their differences

MacVim logo MacVim

MacVim is a port of the text editor Vim to Mac OS X.

Spacemacs logo Spacemacs

Community-driven Emacs distribution that meshes Emacs and Vim features.
  • MacVim Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-08
  • Spacemacs Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-26

MacVim

Categories
  • Text Editors
  • IDE
  • Software Development
  • Developer Tools
Website github.com
Details $-

Spacemacs

Categories
  • Text Editors
  • IDE
  • Software Development
  • Developer Tools
Website spacemacs.org
Details $

MacVim videos

Why is MacVim much faster than Vim in the Terminal?

More videos:

  • Review - MacVim | Astros a Star | Ep. 5

Spacemacs videos

Spacemacs For Noobs

More videos:

  • Review - Can VSCode be a reasonable Spacemacs alternative? (VSpaceCode)
  • Review - EmacsCast 4 - Spacemacs vs Doom vs Emacs

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to MacVim and Spacemacs)
Text Editors
24 24%
76% 76
IDE
28 28%
72% 72
Software Development
35 35%
65% 65
Productivity
13 13%
87% 87

User comments

Share your experience with using MacVim and Spacemacs. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

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

MacVim Reviews

We have no reviews of MacVim yet.
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Spacemacs Reviews

Top 8 Sublime Text Alternatives You Can Use in 2019
Spacemacs uses the space bar as a default leader key, which is where the program gets its name from. The syntax highlighting feature on Spacemacs is enabled by default for all major programming languages, and it is configurable manually through configuration files as well as via internal commands. For all its positives, the program can be quite a bit glitchy at times. From...
Source: beebom.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Spacemacs should be more popular than MacVim. It has been mentiond 6 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.

MacVim mentions (3)

  • Notepad Next
    gVim (only on windows/linux) with a minimal config is my preferred. Fast but a few powerful built-in vim features like search, replace, syntax highlighting, spellchecking, auto-indent etc. It loads in about 1.5s on my machine and renders the text nicely. Maybe take a look at https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim on mac, perhaps someone can comment about the state of macvim? - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Vim: The Best Way to Write Code?
    Vim (aka Vi IMproved) is a highly efficient text editor that has inspired other editors like it, most notably MacVim (which I will refer to as vim from here on) and gVim. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • Vim 9 - Update
    If you want to try out Vim9, you can download the latest Win32 binaries from: https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases. For MacOS, you can use https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/. Source: almost 3 years ago

Spacemacs mentions (6)

  • Our teacher only allows us to use VIM
    Show them spacemacs.org, github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs or at least spacevim.org. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Creating Haskell notebooks with org-mode
    Your Emacs will need some packages: org, org-babel and haskell-mode. If you use spacemacs it is enough to add these layers in your .spacemacs:. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Vim Users! Share your Clever Configs and Plugin Setups (or learn something new)🔥
    Try https://spacemacs.org magit + org-mode are the big selling points. Magit especially for programming. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Emacs' org-mode gets citation support
    Aside from editing on mobile devices, I think Emacs isn't as hard to pick up as it once was. It's certainly not easy but tools like Spacemacs or Doom make it much simpler to get started and really limit the need to create and edit a complicated little library of your Elisp code. http://spacemacs.org https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • A guide to create tmux like Custom Layouts in Spacemacs
    Coming from a vim world with tmux, I had really missed the multiple split window layout in Spacemacs. But after knowing how to define custom layouts this seemed to be an easy exercise for me. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing MacVim and Spacemacs, you can also consider the following products

Neovim - Vim's rebirth for the 21st century

Atom - At GitHub, we’re building the text editor we’ve always wanted: hackable to the core, but approachable on the first day without ever touching a config file. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.

Kakoune - Vim inspired — Faster as in less keystrokes — Multiple selections — Orthogonal design

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

Vim - Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing

Spacevim - SpaceVim is a distribution of the Vim editor that’s inspired by Spacemacs.