macvim VS vim9

Compare macvim vs vim9 and see what are their differences.

macvim

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

vim9

An experimental fork of Vim, exploring ways to make Vim script faster and better. (by brammool)
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macvim vim9
20 8
7,414 450
0.4% -
9.8 0.0
about 2 months ago about 4 years ago
Vim Script Vim script
Vim License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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.

vim9

Posts with mentions or reviews of vim9. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-16.
  • Which version of Vim do you use?
    5 projects | /r/vim | 16 Mar 2023
    According to some of the original benchmarks Bram and others did, yes, by a small margin.
  • So, is your main editor Vim or Neovim?
    15 projects | /r/vim | 4 Jul 2022
    For folks wondering why more neovim users (including me) are out there. Please check the Vision of Neovim, which pretty much aligned with what I wanted when vim became only editor of daily use. And maybe that is also the reason it aligns with most people and why they started / switched to neovim. Plus, (personally), I hate Vimscript. It's complicated and I even felt to write my own language than writing in Vimscript. Moreover, they came up with Vimscript 9.0 now after so long time and with a Warning! That's just lame.
    15 projects | /r/vim | 4 Jul 2022
    I can't comment on the language, but Bram wrote up motivations in brammool/vim9.
  • Update on Vim9
    2 projects | /r/vim | 30 Dec 2021
  • Vim 9 - Update
    3 projects | /r/vim | 21 Apr 2021
  • Wheel: Navigation framework for Vim: buffer groups, mru, outline, yank
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Feb 2021
    I don't see why you would write a plugin in VimL in 2021. I mean even VimL's author decided to just create a new language — vim9 script — instead of fixing this one [1].

    With neovim rpc you can write glorious plugins in TypeScript and Python such as coc.nvim [2].

    Other than that, I'm inspired by amount of work you put in the project.

    [1]: https://github.com/brammool/vim9#3-better-vim-script

  • Todo List for Vim
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2021
    I think its cryptic reputation comes form the use of normal mode commands and regex within scripts. There certainly are warts, like the user's 'ignorecase' setting permeating to many places in the runtime. Which I'd love to see fixed and whilst may also represent a breaking change for some scripts would be far more easily adoptable.

    [1] https://github.com/brammool/vim9/blob/master/README.md

What are some alternatives?

When comparing macvim and vim9 you can also consider the following projects:

neovim - Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability

vimr - VimR — Neovim GUI for macOS in Swift

coc.nvim - Nodejs extension host for vim & neovim, load extensions like VSCode and host language servers.

Vim - The official Vim repository

vim-win32-installer - Vim Win32 Installer

vim9jit - a vim9script -> lua transpiler (written in Rust)

vim-appimage - AppImage for gVim

notepad2 - Notepad2-zufuliu is a light-weight Scintilla based text editor for Windows with syntax highlighting, code folding, auto-completion and API list for many programming languages and documents, bundled with file browser plugin metapath-zufuliu.

NotepadNext - A cross-platform, reimplementation of Notepad++

notepadqq - A simple, general-purpose editor for Linux