Software Alternatives & Startups

Vim VS CKEditor

Compare Vim VS CKEditor and see what are their differences

Vim logo Vim

Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing

CKEditor logo CKEditor

Real-time collaborative future-ready rich text editor
  • Vim Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23
  • CKEditor Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-07-08

CKEditor 5 is a modern WYSIWYG rich text editor that can easily accommodate the requirements of businesses and users in the age of digital transformation. It allows software creators and developers to build powerful writing solutions for applications of all sorts, within hours. Thanks to a fully customizable framework, ready-to-use builds, native integrations, extensive documentation, and reliable customer support, the editor can be fully tailored to your needs.

To provide users with all-around streamlined and collaborative writing experience, you can additionally include advanced features such as Track Changes and Comments, Revision History, and (if preferred) Real-time Collaboration! Easy Export to PDF and Word, responsive images, pagination, Markdown input and output support, and robust paste from Word and Google Docs are also popular choices.

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.

CKEditor features and specs

  • Real-time collaboration editing
    Premium
  • Comments
    Premium
  • Track changes
    Premium
  • Revision History
    Premium
  • CKBox File Manager
    Premium
  • Autoformatting
  • Autolink
  • Autosave
  • Basic text styles (Bold, Italic, Highlight, Underline, Strikethrough, Subscript, Superscript)
  • Code & Quote Blocks
  • Drag and drop
  • Export to PDF and Word
    Premium
  • Find and replace
  • Font styles
  • Image resize, style & alignment
  • Image responsiveness
  • Inserting images by pasting URL
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Lists (bulleted, numbered, checklists)
  • Markdown support
  • Math and Chemical formulas
    Premium
  • Media embed
  • @Mentions
  • Pagination
    Premium
  • Paste from Word & G-Docs
  • Read-only support
  • Restricted editing
  • Spell and grammar checking
    Premium
  • Tables support with columns resizing, selecting rows and columns
  • Text layout
  • Word count
  • React integration
  • Vue JS integration
  • Angular integration

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.

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

CKEditor videos

CKEditor 5 - Collaboration features

More videos:

  • Demo - CKEditor 5 – Revision History feature

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Vim and CKEditor)
Text Editors
82 82%
18% 18
IDE
100 100%
0% 0
Rich Text Editor
0 0%
100% 100
Software Development
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 Vim and CKEditor

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

CKEditor Reviews

14 Best Open Source WYSIWYG HTML Editors
CKEditor 5 is a feature-rich and open-source WYSIWYG editing solution with great flexibility. The user interface looks modern. Hence, you may expect a modern user experience.
Source: itsfoss.com
Looking for a CKEditor? Try these 10 Alternatives
CKEditor is a popular, versatile WYSIWYG text editor which allows you to write content directly on web pages or online applications. It can be used to create Word-like documents or provide a simple toolbar for email and instant message content. CKEditor provides rich text formatting options as well as spell check.

Social recommendations and mentions

CKEditor might be a bit more popular than Vim. We know about 11 links to it since March 2021 and only 10 links to Vim. 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.

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: almost 4 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
View more

CKEditor mentions (11)

  • Show HN: I'm building an app to replace Overleaf and Notion
    The actual "word processor" or editor of notion is hot garbage, especially for software/keyboard people. Try out something like https://ckeditor.com/ and it is infinitely better. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Storybook Starter Guide: Learn Design System Principles
    For example, at CKEditor, we use a hybrid approach — Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets (Sass) preprocessor and CSS variables:. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Your rich text could be a cross-site scripting vulnerability
    Another sign that your application might vulnerable to SXSS is simply whether or not you are using a rich text editor, such as TinyMCE or CKEditor. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Rails Frontend Bundling - Which one should I choose?
    Problematic dependencies. Some dependencies like CKEditor are designed specifically to work with Webpacker and won't work with other tools. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • Best Text Editor to integrate with React?
    At my work, we recently released a beta of our switch CKEditor, coming from Draftjs. Works pretty well. They have a free license available, not sure if that would cover your use-case tho. Source: over 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

TinyMCE - TinyMCE is a content editor that functions as a plug-in for Wordpress websites.

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

Summernote - Summernote is a JavaScript library that helps users create WYSIWYG editors online.

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

Froala Editor - Froala Editor is a WYSIWYG HTML editor that enables rich text editing capabilities for the applications.