Emacs vs. JavaScript vs. Trix vs. jEdit Comparison Chart

At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types. Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users. Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts. Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface. A wide range of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, IRC client, and more. A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions. Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers. Text shaping with HarfBuzz. Native support for JSON parsing. Better support for Cairo drawing. Portable dumping used instead of unexec. Support for XDG conventions for init files. Additional early-init initialization file. Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line. Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick.

Compose beautifully formatted text in your web application. Trix is an editor for writing messages, comments, articles, and lists, the simple documents most web apps are made of. It features a sophisticated document model, support for embedded attachments, and outputs terse and consistent HTML. Most WYSIWYG editors are wrappers around HTML’s contenteditable and execCommand APIs, designed by Microsoft to support live editing of web pages in Internet Explorer 5.5, and eventually reverse-engineered and copied by other browsers. Because these APIs were never fully specified or documented, and because WYSIWYG HTML editors are enormous in scope, each browser’s implementation has its own set of bugs and quirks, and JavaScript developers are left to resolve the inconsistencies. Trix sidesteps these inconsistencies by treating contenteditable as an I/O device: when input makes its way to the editor, Trix converts that input into an editing operation on its internal document model.