So apparently there are two editors inspired by vim, but built from the ground up (as opposed to neovim, a vim fork that seeks to improve on top of vim).

I’ve heard of Helix several times prior, but it never quite attracted me. Seemed like vim, but different key bindings and much worse plugin system. It also has different visual and normal modes than vim, but it didn’t quite click with me. I do like it’s multi-cursor ability though.

Then it turns out that Helix was also inspired by not just vim, but also kakoune. Kakoune also has different keybindings, and different modes, but its different modes make sense to me. It fuses visual and normal mode into one. Your normal mode is for both navigation and selection.

Kakoune promotes the idea that you should visually see the text you’re operating on before running the command. You know how in vim, “dd” deletes a line, “dw” deletes a word, and “d$” deletes to the end of the line? In vim, you don’t see what you’re deleting before its gone (which is fine and works for many). In kakoune, the selection happens first before the action. So you select the word or the line, and then you delete.

But what I found to be Kakoune’s killer feature was its shell integration. Kakoune seemlessly integrates into the unix shell, allowing you to offload many tasks to it. For example, instead of it having a built-in sort command, you use the unix sort command to sort your lines.

I’m surprised kakoune isn’t more popular. Yes, it is still in a much earlier phase than vim, and the ecosystem is far less mature, but I am surprised to see Helix gaining more traction.

I’m still very new to kakoune and exploring it. But I like it a lot so far.

  • lelgenio
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    1 year ago

    Long-ish time Kakoune user here.

    For those who have tried Kakoune, once you’ve included things like Treesitter and the clangd language server, which one feels faster, Kakoune or Neovim?

    I never felt the need to install something like Treesitter because I feel selection-based editing is already powerful enough, if that gives you an idea of how much faster I am with Kakoune compared to Neovim. Maybe I just don’t know everything Treesitter can do 🤔

    which apparently allows you to have one master Kakoune instance and multiple slave instances that would be in sync

    It’s not a master/slave setup, it really is client/server, even the first instance of kakoune that you open will be a client that you can close without the other instances going down with it.

    I’m not sure if Kakoune shares the clipboard with all of those instances?

    Yup, all shared: registers, buffers, marks, hooks. (You can choose not to share stuff between clients)

      • lelgenio
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        1 year ago

        ☝️ 🤓 If by master/slave you mean “A system in which the master node is responsible to do everything a slave does plus coordinate slaves”
        and by client/server you mean “A system in which a server is responsible only for coordinating clients”.
        I don’t think so, because the first window is not special, it just spawns a server if none is assigned.