StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. Emacs vs Jest

Emacs vs Jest

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Emacs
Emacs
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes322
Jest
Jest
Stacks15.2K
Followers4.1K
Votes175

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.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Emacs, Jest

Dane
Dane

Feb 7, 2020

Needs adviceonCypressCypressJestJest

As we all know testing is an important part of any application. To assist with our testing we are going to use both Cypress and Jest. We feel these tools complement each other and will help us get good coverage of our code. We will use Cypress for our end to end testing as we've found it quite user friendly. Jest will be used for our unit tests because we've seen how many larger companies use it with great success.

836k views836k
Comments
Anonymous
Anonymous

Feb 6, 2020

Needs advice

Postman will be used to do integration testing with the backend API we create. It offers a clean interface to create many requests, and you can even organize these requests into collections. It helps to test the backend API first to make sure it's working before using it in the front-end. Jest can also be used for testing and is already embedded into React. Not only does it offer unit testing support in javascript, it can also do snapshot testing for the front-end to make sure components are rendering correctly. Enzyme is complementary to Jest and offers more functions such as shallow rendering. UnitTest will be used for Python testing as it is simple, has a lot of functionality and already built in with python. Sentry will be used for keeping track of errors as it is also easily integratable with Heroku because they offer it as an add-on. LogDNA will be used for tracking logs which are not errors and is also a Heroku add-on. Its good to have a separate service to record logs, monitor, track and even fix errors in real-time so our application can run more smoothly.

290k views290k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Emacs
Emacs
Jest
Jest

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 provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine.

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.;Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.;A large number of extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more. Many of these extensions are distributed with GNU Emacs others are available separately.
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
Statistics
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
15.2K
Followers
1.2K
Followers
4.1K
Votes
322
Votes
175
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 65
    Vast array of extensions
  • 44
    Have all you can imagine
  • 40
    Everything i need in one place
  • 39
    Portability
  • 32
    Customer config
Cons
  • 4
    Hard to learn for beginners
  • 4
    So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked
  • 1
    Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux
Pros
  • 36
    Open source
  • 32
    Mock by default makes testing much simpler
  • 23
    Testing React Native Apps
  • 20
    Parallel test running
  • 16
    Fast
Cons
  • 4
    Documentation
  • 4
    Ambiguous configuration
  • 3
    Difficult
  • 2
    Bugged
  • 2
    Ambiguous

What are some alternatives to Emacs, Jest?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Mocha

Mocha

Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on node.js and the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correct test cases.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Jasmine

Jasmine

Jasmine is a Behavior Driven Development testing framework for JavaScript. It does not rely on browsers, DOM, or any JavaScript framework. Thus it's suited for websites, Node.js projects, or anywhere that JavaScript can run.

Neovim

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

Cypress

Cypress

Cypress is a front end automated testing application created for the modern web. Cypress is built on a new architecture and runs in the same run-loop as the application being tested. As a result Cypress provides better, faster, and more reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress works on any front-end framework or website.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana