Emacs vs Jest: What are the differences?
Emacs: The extensible self-documenting text editor. GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing; Jest: Painless JavaScript Unit Testing. Jest provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine.
Emacs can be classified as a tool in the "Text Editor" category, while Jest is grouped under "Javascript Testing Framework".
Some of the features offered by Emacs are:
- Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.
- Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
- Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.
On the other hand, Jest provides the following key features:
- Familiar Approach: Built on top of the Jasmine test framework, using familiar expect(value).toBe(other) assertions
- Mock by Default: Automatically mocks CommonJS modules returned by require(), making most existing code testable
- Short Feedback Loop: DOM APIs are mocked and tests run in parallel via a small node.js command line utility
"Vast array of extensions" is the top reason why over 57 developers like Emacs, while over 24 developers mention "Open source" as the leading cause for choosing Jest.
Jest is an open source tool with 26.1K GitHub stars and 3.53K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Jest's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Jest has a broader approval, being mentioned in 263 company stacks & 150 developers stacks; compared to Emacs, which is listed in 96 company stacks and 68 developer stacks.