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.

  • CyclohexaneOPM
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    1 year ago

    I’ve wanted to try emacs but have been afraid to do so. I like that emacs basically replaces your terminal and just has a semi-OS inside. But I heard the performance is lacking. What do you think?

    • Bugamn@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been using emacs with evil for a while and performance is fine when running it in client-server mode. Vim might be faster opening files on my computer, but if I had as many plugins for vim as I have for emacs, it would likely be as slow, and it’s client-server mode wasn’t as good when I switched.

    • Euphoma
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      1 year ago

      Yeah performance isn’t that great, its single threaded so if a task is taking a while all of emacs is frozen. It usually isn’t terrible though and is better than VS Code, and the text editing part is faster than VS Code on large text files anyways.

    • Gilgamesh
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      1 year ago

      Another (new) Emacs user here, I managed to reduce Emacs startup time to 0.6s - 0.5s on my garbage hardware. Some Emacs users have even manages to reduce the startup time to 0.3 - 0.2 seconds!

      Also, launching Emacs in --daemon mode makes creating new frames instantanous and because of it you won’t experience any form of lag when using Emacs!