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Vim VS D2

Compare Vim VS D2 and see what are their differences

Vim logo Vim

Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing

D2 logo D2

Modern diagram scripting language to turn text to diagrams
  • Vim Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23
  • D2 Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-25

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.

D2 features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

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.

Analysis of D2

Overall verdict

  • D2 is an excellent modern diagramming tool that lets you create diagrams from plain text, offering a clean syntax, attractive automatic layouts, and strong developer-friendly integration, making it a top choice for text-based diagramming.

Why this product is good

  • Uses a simple, readable declarative syntax that makes diagrams easy to write and version-control
  • Produces polished, professional-looking diagrams with multiple layout engines (Dagre, ELK, TALA)
  • Open source and actively maintained with a growing community and ecosystem
  • Supports advanced features like themes, animations, sketch-style rendering, and interactive tooltips
  • Integrates well with developer workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and documentation-as-code setups
  • Offers both a CLI and a hosted playground for quick experimentation

Recommended for

  • Software engineers and architects documenting system designs
  • Teams practicing diagrams-as-code and version-controlled documentation
  • Technical writers who want reproducible, maintainable diagrams
  • Developers who prefer text-based workflows over drag-and-drop editors
  • Open source projects needing embeddable architecture and flow diagrams

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

D2 videos

D2 Review | If John Carpenter's The Thing Was A Soap Opera

More videos:

  • Review - Review: Gait D2 Series
  • Review - Classic Game Room - D2 review for Sega Dreamcast

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Vim and D2)
Text Editors
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
IDE
100 100%
0% 0
Open Source
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 Vim and D2

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

D2 Reviews

We have no reviews of D2 yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Vim should be more popular than D2. 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.

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
View more

D2 mentions (4)

  • Exploring Goja: A Golang JavaScript Runtime
    I work on the D2 project ([0]) and we switched from other Javascript runners (v8go) to Goja. Using a JS runtime with a dependency on cgo means your Go program loses the (huge) benefit of cross-compiling to different architectures, since at build time it gets linked to the architecture-specific libc. If you're interested in some production code with Goja, this is our code for calling RoughJS [1] from Go in order to... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • I want to contribute to open source but don't know where to start
    You're welcome in D2! I maintain a Text to diagram language, released a few months ago, 13k+ stars, I'm actively tagging issues that are good first issues, clean well-tested Go, and I'm happy to help you get that first merge in. Feel free to chime in on any issue that looks interesting! https://github.com/terrastruct/d2. Source: about 3 years ago
  • Concrete Diagramming, a Lightweight Alternative to C4
    Right. It's okay to leave written documentation on SaaS (e.g. Notion), because the text is the artifact. If they're shutting down, or I don't like them anymore, I just move the text. But if Ilograph goes down, all I have is useless YAML. Our team went through this thought process when we decided to open source our text-to-diagram language, users need to be able to reproduce their docs even if we shut down... - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
  • Interested in contributing to an open-source project? (11k stars)
    Hello! I run a popular open-source project: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2, it's a programming language for making diagrams from text. Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Vim and D2, 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.

draw.io - Online diagramming application

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

flowchart.fun - An open-source tool for generating flowcharts from text

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

PocketBase.io - Open Source backend with realtime database, authentication, file storage and admin dashboard, all compiled in 1 portable executable.