macvim VS iTerm2

Compare macvim vs iTerm2 and see what are their differences.

macvim

Vim - the text editor - for macOS (by macvim-dev)

iTerm2

iTerm2 is a terminal emulator for Mac OS X that does amazing things. (by gnachman)
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macvim iTerm2
20 169
7,428 14,513
0.4% -
9.8 9.7
2 months ago 3 days ago
Vim Script Objective-C
Vim License GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

macvim

Posts with mentions or reviews of macvim. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-05.
  • Ask HN: Is Vim Dead?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Mar 2024
    I sure hope mainline Vim isn't dead. I keep trying NeoVim but I prefer using Vim in a GUI and no NeoVim GUI I've found has the level of polish that MacVim [1] has. VimR [2] comes close but keep finding myself going back to MacVim.

    [1] https://macvim.org/

  • Vim 9 adds virtual text
    3 projects | /r/vim | 5 Aug 2022
    This is already part of the official Vim (through the patches). The various Linux distributions and MacOS ship Vim with various patches. So this will be available whenever these distributions decide to include this patch. If you want to use the latest Vim without waiting for the official distribution, you can download it from: Windows: https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases MacOS: https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/releases Linux: You can build the latest sources.
  • Vim 9 has been released
    7 projects | /r/vim | 28 Jun 2022
    The Mac Vim repository is synced up to Vim 9.0.0001 (https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/commit/adfe7be38282da7d772cca025ebbe5080085ef6f). If you have compiler installed in your system, you can build the sources. I am not sure why the corresponding release package is not made available.
  • Notepad Next
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Apr 2022
    gVim (only on windows/linux) with a minimal config is my preferred. Fast but a few powerful built-in vim features like search, replace, syntax highlighting, spellchecking, auto-indent etc. It loads in about 1.5s on my machine and renders the text nicely.

    Maybe take a look at https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim on mac, perhaps someone can comment about the state of macvim?

  • What are your favourite mac apps ?
    8 projects | /r/macapps | 13 Oct 2021
    Mac Vim - editing text / code
  • Vim 9 update
    4 projects | /r/vim | 31 May 2021
    MacOS: https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/releases
  • Vim 9 - Update
    3 projects | /r/vim | 21 Apr 2021
    If you want to try out Vim9, you can download the latest Win32 binaries from: https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases. For MacOS, you can use https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/
  • Is MacVim worth it?
    6 projects | /r/vim | 6 Apr 2021
    It’s merged from vim every few weeks (https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/wiki/Merging-from-upstream-Vim) and is listed on the main vim download page. It’s pretty standard vim.
    6 projects | /r/vim | 6 Apr 2021
    You can read up on MacVim's docs though no here: https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/blob/master/runtime/doc/gui_mac.txt. Features MacVim support include being bundled as a Mac app, can bind menu items to TouchBar, supports touch pad gestures, drag-and-drop, full-screen support, can launch using a mvim:// protocol (e.g. in iTerm2 you can tell it to launch MacVim when you click on a file path), etc.
  • Vim in iTerm2?
    2 projects | /r/vim | 29 Dec 2020
    in your ~/.gvimrc. mvim being a convenience script provided by MacVim.

iTerm2

Posts with mentions or reviews of iTerm2. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-16.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing macvim and iTerm2 you can also consider the following projects:

WindTerm - A professional cross-platform SSH/Sftp/Shell/Telnet/Serial terminal.

kitty - Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal

vimr - VimR — Neovim GUI for macOS in Swift

neovim - Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability

HomeBrew - 🍺 The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)

exa - A modern replacement for ‘ls’.

Karabiner-Elements - Karabiner-Elements is a powerful utility for keyboard customization on macOS Sierra (10.12) or later.

ohmyzsh - 🙃 A delightful community-driven (with 2,300+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 300+ optional plugins (rails, git, macOS, hub, docker, homebrew, node, php, python, etc), 140+ themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.

fish-shell - The user-friendly command line shell.

vim9 - An experimental fork of Vim, exploring ways to make Vim script faster and better.

asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more

Vim - The official Vim repository