Altova XMLSpy vs. Vim

Altova XMLSpy is an excellent tool for creating/designing new XML schemas (XSDs) using a visual layout tool and helps developers and architects work with XML and JSON documents, understand and validate and diagnose issues with XML and JSON documents. It is not well suited for working with other data formats, such as YAML or CSV.

Incentivized

I would recommend Vim in any scenario where text files have to be viewed, created, or edited on GNU/Linux computers. Regardless if you need to quickly change a few things in a configuration file, or you need to write up a full document, Vim is great. I wouldn't use Vim to view, edit, or create anything that requires "rich-text". In other words, if you need to format the text (bolding, font colours, word-art, etc), then Vim isn't the tool to use.

Incentivized

• XML schema (XSD) design and maintenance
• XML document validation
• XML and JSON document reformatting and pretty-printing

Incentivized

• The efficient modal editing makes it very fast to write/edit code as I think of it.
• The customization and wide range of plugins let me do very specific things and automate parts of my workflow.
• The fact that it runs inside a terminal simplifies my window management and just becomes another Tmux window in my workflow.

Incentivized

• Application performance could be improved, especially initial load speed
• Better support for large document handling (documents hundreds or thousands of megabytes in size)
• Remove all nagging popups to upgrade

Incentivized

• Without a doubt the hardest program to learn. It is a completely different paradigm of thinking compared to other editors
• By default it doesn't have lots of fancy features you would find in larger IDE programs like code completion and linking
• It lives in the command line so a user has to be comfortable with this interface

Incentivized

I don't consider the steep learning curve to be a hinderance on the overall usability. I would rate this a ten, but to be honest a lot of people do get hung up at the beginning and just abandon it. However, for people who have made the moderate effort to get over the hump, nothing can be more usable.

Incentivized

There is no commercial support for Vim. Thus, it will not get a mark beyond 5. However, community support is very good. You can easily find solutions for most of the problems in the community.

Incentivized

XMLSpy does not have many capable competitors, it is the market leader and other alternatives do not provide the tools we rely on.

Incentivized

Vim's keybindings are a lot more complex than Notepad++. With that, comes a whole bunch of capability that Notepad++ just can't match. Emacs is comparable, in terms of capabilities--because Vim is built into so many unix systems, I chose to learn it instead of Emacs. Knowing both probably isn't a bad idea, but there's enough to learn in either camp to keep you busy

Incentivized

• XMLSpy has made us much more efficient when designing new integrations

Incentivized

• It always increases productivity.
• Sometimes feature discovery is not easy. It could be documented well like how to install a plugin and if it supported well or not.

Incentivized