GNU Emacs vs. NetBeans

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GNU Emacs
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
GNU Emacs is described as a free extensible and customizable text editor for the Lisp programming language.N/A
NetBeans
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
NetBeans is a free and open source platform and integrated development environment (IDE).N/A
Pricing
GNU EmacsNetBeans
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GNU EmacsNetBeans
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GNU EmacsNetBeans
Best Alternatives
GNU EmacsNetBeans
Small Businesses
BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 10.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Vim
Vim
Score 9.5 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Vim
Vim
Score 9.5 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GNU EmacsNetBeans
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(4 ratings)
7.8
(22 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(2 ratings)
8.5
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
GNU EmacsNetBeans
Likelihood to Recommend
Open Source
Emacs is best utilized on a Unix system where it can be easily installed and accessed. It allows for quick editing of files on a system whether you are accessing it locally through the console or remotely via an ssh connection. Once users familiarize themselves with the Emacs shortcuts, it becomes a pretty efficient text manipulation program. On a standard Windows computer, it is less likely to use Emacs for code editing, especially if you have a local repository on your host machine.
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Open Source
NetBeans is extremely user friendly and easy to start developing complex applications. Adding and configuring external libraries is much simpler than in Eclipse. It is highly cost effective and most of the latest framework based libraries required are automatically downloaded to the projects. The overall tool is also light weight and consumes less memory as compared to other competitor tools.
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Pros
Open Source
  • GNU Emacs is a text editor that can do almost anything that you want to do with it. It is fairly easy to extend the functionality using Emacs Lisp with a large library available.
  • It can be easily customized using themes as well as custom code to change the look and feel as well as how everything works.
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Open Source
  • Debugging - Save time hunting down errors by stepping through the code to find the root of a problem.
  • Refactoring - Easily rename classes and variables or make other structural changes using built-in refactoring tools.
  • Service management - NetBeans integrates seamlessly with web application servers like Tomcat and GlassFish.
  • Source control - Works well with Git and other version control tools.
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Cons
Open Source
  • Emacs is old, so it's a little crufty and not too easy to pick up and start using. There is a community package called Spacemacs that simplifies a lot of things that you do with Emacs. It is probably better suited to beginners.
  • Sometimes, the choices that were made to integrate certain functionality change the basic models for that functionality. This is seen primarily in the version control system support, where multiple version control systems are supported and "unified" to a standard Emacs-y way of doing things. This can be confusing to the new user not familiar with the Emacs way.
  • Emacs has, as its foundation, a lisp interpreter. This means that the extension language for Emacs is emacs-lisp. Some people find lisp hard to understand and have difficulties writing Emacs extension code, or understanding existing code.
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Open Source
  • NetBeans [should] work smoothly with systems having less RAM. Systems with less RAM face trouble with NetBeans.
  • File open history also requires improvement. Once NetBeans is restarted, all files are closed automatically and there is no shortcut to open last opened files.
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Usability
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Open Source
Netbeans enhances my coding work, shows me where I have errors and helps find variable instances. I would be lost without find/replace in projects functionality as I use projects as templates for new projects. Occasionally the code hints aggravate me, but I understand that it is actually making me a better coder, working to get the 'green light' of a clean file with no errors or clumsy code.
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Support Rating
Open Source
Everything that you need to know about Emacs can be found on the internet. There are many Emacs "cheat sheets" that list out all of the shortcuts for Emacs. There are videos on how to use Emacs. Emacs is easily installed using the standard Linux package managers and can also be easily updated through them as well. There are tutorials on how to customize Emacs to your liking.
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Open Source
NetBeans has a very strong user community. We can find solutions here for almost all the problems we face. In addition, we can forward NetBeans Support teams the problems we cannot solve. We can get quick feedback from the support teams, but I generally try to solve my problems by following the forums.
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Alternatives Considered
Open Source
Of course, Vim is a good contender for comparison as well, so I'll include it. I find Emacs much easier to learn, which will help speed up productivity for newer users. It seems much faster than VIM and VSCode, especially under load. It's highly highly customizable, in ways other editors don't stack up against. Its lack of bloat also is a nice addition to a great product.
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Open Source
It works very smoothly as compared to other tools . The problem of restarting and reimporting the projects is not in the netbeans IDE . The front end development features are good . Netbeans connector is one of the best thing which enables us to deeply integrate netbeans IDE with google chrome browser
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Return on Investment
Open Source
  • Emacs is free software, there is no cost at all.
  • It has helped tremendously in situations where many, or large, log files need to be searched.
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Open Source
  • By working on Netbeans I just learned one more tool and can teach others about it. One should learn every tool so that it might help someday if another editor is not available and you have to use different software for your work.
  • Compiling code became easy as it is not a feature of normal text editors. Only IDE can do this.
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