Software Alternatives & Reviews

Spacemacs VS Vim

Compare Spacemacs VS Vim and see what are their differences

Spacemacs logo Spacemacs

Community-driven Emacs distribution that meshes Emacs and Vim features.

Vim logo Vim

Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing
  • Spacemacs Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-26
  • Vim Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23

Spacemacs

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

Vim

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

Spacemacs videos

Spacemacs For Noobs

More videos:

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

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 Spacemacs and Vim)
Text Editors
12 12%
88% 88
IDE
11 11%
89% 89
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
Software Development
10 10%
90% 90

User comments

Share your experience with using Spacemacs and Vim. 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 Spacemacs and Vim

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

Vim Reviews

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
7 open source alternatives to Dreamweaver
Vim or Emacs. Without participating in the holy war between these two traditional text editors, I can safely say that there are a number of enhancements for web editing available for both. So if you're already a terminal junkie, take your pick. Or, if those don't satisfy, try one of these Emacs/Vim alternatives.
Source: opensource.com
Top 5 IDEs for Go
Don’t worry about getting lost in Vim. VI Improved has a number of plugins to help developers edit their Go code even easier. The vim-go plugin automatically installs all the necessary bits and bobs to provide a smoother integration for Go developers in Vim.
Source: jaxenter.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Vim should be more popular than Spacemacs. It has been mentiond 10 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.

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
View more

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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 2 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 / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

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

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.

GNU Emacs - GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more.

Neovim - Vim's rebirth for the 21st century

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