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Brackets

443
748
+ 1
202
Neovim

609
722
+ 1
183
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Brackets vs Neovim: What are the differences?

What is Brackets? A modern, open source text editor that understands web design. With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, Brackets is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser. Try Creative Cloud Extract (preview) for Brackets for an easy way to get clean, minimal CSS straight from a PSD with no generated code.

What is Neovim? Vim's rebirth for the 21st century. 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.

Brackets and Neovim can be primarily classified as "Text Editor" tools.

Some of the features offered by Brackets are:

  • Code Hints from a PSD
  • Inline Editors
  • Live Preview

On the other hand, Neovim provides the following key features:

  • More powerful plugins
  • Better GUI architecture
  • First-class support for embedding

"Beautiful UI" is the top reason why over 46 developers like Brackets, while over 23 developers mention "Modern and more powerful Vim" as the leading cause for choosing Neovim.

Brackets and Neovim are both open source tools. It seems that Neovim with 32K GitHub stars and 2.33K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Brackets with 29.9K GitHub stars and 6.42K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Brackets has a broader approval, being mentioned in 36 company stacks & 32 developers stacks; compared to Neovim, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.

Advice on Brackets and Neovim
Rogério R. Alcântara
Needs advice
on
NeovimNeovim
and
VimVim

For a Visual Studio Code/Atom developer that works mostly with Node.js/TypeScript/Ruby/Go and wants to get rid of graphic-text-editors-IDE-like at once, which one is worthy of investing time to pick up?

I'm a total n00b on the subject, but I've read good things about Neovim's Lua support, and I wonder what would be the VIM response/approach for it?

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Replies (6)
Recommends
on
NeovimNeovimVimVim

Neovim can basically do everything Vim can with one major advantage - the number of contributors to the code base is just so much wider (Vim is ~100% maintained only by B. Mooleanaar). Whatever you learn for Neovim you can also apply to Vim and vice versa. And of course there is the never ending Vim vs Emacs controversy - but better not get into that war.

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Jeffrey Johnson
Recommends
at

Actually, the biggest advantage with Neovim (as a VS user) is that you can embed REAL Neovim as the editor UI, rather than using a "Vim emulation", you're using actual NVIM, embedded in VS!

"asvetliakov.vscode-neovim" is the extension you are looking for:

  1. Install the 'vscode-neovim; extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim)
  2. Install Neovim version 0.5+ nightly
  3. Start winning.

(You can install neovim-nightly separately for just vscode, I usually build and install it to /opt/nvim - it's enough enough to do - let me know if you need help).

Works wonderfully. It might not work out of the box if you have some 100K epic nvim initialization file, but the plugin documents a workaround for having an embedding/VS specific configuration.

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Kudos Beluga
Recommends
on
NeovimNeovim

I don't actually notice much of a difference between the two, as the end result looks identical. If you use Vim and are switch to Neovim it's an extremely easy 1-minute process. I switched from Vim to Neovim. I can't say I found much of a difference, but the key points where Neovim could be better than just vim is that first, there are much more people maintaining Neovim compared to vim, which means fewer bugs and a modern code base. It also has a smaller code base which might result in a small speed improvement. Another thing is that it's basically just a fork of vim, so what harm can it do? ;)

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Recommends
on
VimVim

I recommend using vim 8+ it has native plugin support if you need language supports you can install the package vim-nox which will come with support for python, lua, ruby, etc

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Albert Kim
Recommends

It truly depends on whether you want to completely avoid GUI and stick to TUI and command lines. If you want to edit all of your codes within a terminal, then Vim or neovim would be the choice. Emacs can be run in a terminal, but the functionality is limited. Most people use Emacs using GUI and emacs-client not to use too much memory.

My general preference is to use an independent text editor, which is better if it is highly customizable and programmable. So, I have used Emacs for several years. For beginners, I guess Emacs requires significant time to learn to fully enjoy its wonderful functionalities. In that sense, using atom would be a recommendable option.

Regardless of all the situations, learning basic vim in the terminal will help you in any case. In summary, I recommend 1. vim as a default editor in the terminal 2. atom if you are a beginner, or 3. Emacs if you have a long-term plan to master a programmable editor

Other editors like sublime text, VS code, and so forth are also worth learning and using. But, no matter which editor you choose, stick to one or two until you become an advanced user. Being able to use most text editors at an intermediate level is waste of time.

I hope it helps.

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Rogério R. Alcântara
Recommends
on
NeovimNeovim

The hints on the codebase's contributors and the VSCode integration helped me make up my mind.

I really appreciate all comments, though.

Thanks a bunch!

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Decisions about Brackets and Neovim
Samriddhi Sinha
Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling · | 6 upvotes · 970.8K views

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

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Pros of Brackets
Pros of Neovim
  • 51
    Beautiful UI
  • 40
    Lightweight
  • 25
    Extremely customizable
  • 20
    Free plugins
  • 14
    Live Preview
  • 13
    Free themes
  • 8
    Clean
  • 7
    Easy
  • 6
    Integration with photoshop
  • 4
    Perfect for web development
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    Fast
  • 2
    Awesome UI
  • 2
    Clean UI
  • 2
    Code suggestions
  • 31
    Modern and more powerful Vim
  • 27
    Fast
  • 22
    Asynchronous plugins
  • 20
    Stable
  • 18
    Edit text fast
  • 15
    Great community
  • 15
    Vim plugins work out of the box
  • 9
    Embedable
  • 8
    Unix-like
  • 8
    Built-in terminal support
  • 4
    Plugins in any language
  • 2
    External GUIs
  • 2
    Great Colorschemes
  • 2
    Extremely customizable

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Brackets
Cons of Neovim
  • 3
    Not good for backend developer
  • 1
    You have to edit json file to set your settings.
  • 1
    Bad node.js support
    Be the first to leave a con

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Brackets?

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

    What is 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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Brackets?
    What companies use Neovim?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Brackets or Neovim.
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    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Brackets?
    What tools integrate with Neovim?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    What are some alternatives to Brackets and Neovim?
    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.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    See all alternatives