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Comment by Arcuru | Hacker News Reader

I would love for people to steal Kakoune's text editor, I think it's an improvement over Vim for modal editing.

I've been a longtime user of the Vim style of editing, but I checked out Kakoune several years ago and was impressed. I tried it for a week or two and was starting to prefer it over Vim.

The problem is that while Kakoune is a very good competitor to Vim the program, I am only rarely in need of a terminal based editor. The vast majority of my time is spent in full fledged IDEs or in Web-based editors, all of whom have Vim plugins so that I can consistently use the same style.

It's always bummed me out a little bit. I spend the majority of my work days using Vim keys for editing text, and there is an editing style I'd actually prefer to use but I can't because there isn't already widespread adoption. There's not enough benefit for me to learn it if I can't use it everywhere, and switching back and forth with Vim seems extremely difficult.

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I really regret every trying Kakoune. It was totally not worth it, but I just can't go back now.

I've switched from Vim to Kakoune 3 years ago, and lack of support for this modal editing style elsewhere is really frustrating. It is better than Vim's, but in practice that's not a significant difference, and the pain of switching back and forth is something I'm agonizing over all the time.

BTW. The exact kakoune modal editing mode is not even all that flawless. The way x and X work on empty lines is infuriating, and I am actually using a personal fork of kakoune to fix it. https://github.com/dpc/kakoune-dpc . I went so far as prototyping a spinoff of Kakoune: https://github.com/dpc/breeze to look for improvement, but building a full-featured text editor is a lot of work, and I it's not like it's going to fix the problem of switching.

Would you say a few words on what makes Kakoune modal editing better than Vim's?

Not the same guy but I'm a convert from vim also.

>Would you say a few words on what makes Kakoune modal editing better than Vim's?

I guess the big difference is multiple selections. In Kakoune Normal mode you can select multiple selections, and your normal mode commands operate on all those selections at once, and if you switch to insert mode you can insert text at all of those multiple cursors.

I had a paragraph with examples that I just deleted because it had sentences like "you would simply type s;<enter>b&" and that makes you sound like a crazy cultist. A better endorsement is maybe: where I would in the past write a script in python or awk to get info from a log or a csv I usually just jump straight to kakoune and edit the file down to the data I want.

And I consider multiple selections a flaw, a poor man's search&replace. Particularly with neovim's

set inccommand=split

(live substitution). Vim's confirmation prompts make it more comfortable, as well as off-screen matches it shows. Multiple selections are inherently limited to a single screen or you won't be able to see what you're doing.

Verdict: a gimmick.

When I tried `set inccommand=split` in neovim it would sometimes freeze the editor, even when substituting regular-sized files (several Kb), so I had to deactivate it. Granted that this was some time ago, so it might have been improved with recent versions.

To me however multiple selections are not Kakoune's strongest point. It's the fact that in Kakoune you "first select, then modify", while in vim you go "action first, then subject".

Putting the subject first allows for a more visual experience in general - in Kakoune you can always "see what's going to happen" before it happens, because the object is always highlighted. The multiple cursors thing is just a manifestation of this approach. In Vim the experience is more "opaque" - you type some commands in normal mode and suddenly the text changes. As a result Kak is less prone to "accidental edits" like I get in Vim from time to time.

I've heard that some people "abuse" on Vim's Visual mode to get over this limitation. But that feels like a kludge to me. And it doesn't solve the accidental edits.

Kakoune goes the opposite way, there is no such thing as "search and replace" in it, you'd use multiselection for that.

It ends up being much more powerful because the editing language is strictly more expressive than regular expressions: you can select using a regular expression, but you can also use all the rest of the normal mode, such as select/jump to the matching parenthesis or brace (or whatever pair of text your language use to scope things), which is not possible to express in pure regex.

You are far from limited to a single screen, the `(` and `)` commands rotate the main selection, so you can inspect all your selections easily if you want to.

In my experience (as a long time Vim user and as Kakoune's main author) multiple selections end-up being much more attractive for quick edits where there's only a handful instances to replace than devising the correct regex/replacement pair, and their interactive nature makes them quicker to use than the macro alternative (which is also supported in Kakoune).

I'd just like to add that if you want to do regex-based search and replace like in Vim, it's super easy to pipe your selection through sed. The way Kakoune implements pipes is just amazingly good. I love that if you have multiple selections, each one gets piped through the command. I love that you can undo piping your selections to another program. And while I've barely scratched the surface of what you can do with macros, I have a couple that I use constantly. After 19 years with vi and then vim, I switched to kak after trying it for a week.

In summary: great job with Kakoune! I'm a delighted user.

As I've said in a thread I made on forums a while ago, search&replace has other advantages. Reviewing matches, as long as you use /gc, is the default in vim. It's opt-in in kak, which I think is a bad default. Does kakoune even indicate you have some other selections off-screen?

I worked with large and messy codebase, where apparently there was always something more important than cleaning up.

I considered multiple selections a bit of a gimmick in sublime text and various emacs/vim extensions but the way it works in kakoune feels completely different.

Think about vim (and kakoune) as basically a highly interactive language for editing text. At least at a conceptual level something like diw is basically a function (d) applied to data (iw). Vim is completely scalar. The type of all the functions is more or less something like string → string. Kakoune is the APL of text editors. Multiple selections are an array of strings to operate on. It automatically maps the function (editor commands) over every selection. I find this extremely attractive and powerful.

At least for me kakoune blows all other editors out of the water. It really is quite good.

Multi-cursor is actually a better version of search-and-play-macro, not search-and-replace.

The advantage of it is that you can execute the "macro" incrementally and spot early when you've made a mistake, rather than recording a macro then letting rip and discovering, too late, that there was a mistake 80% of the way though, and now you need to undo the whole thing and and try again.

(I use multiple-cursors in Emacs for multiple selections, iedit-mode for live substitution (sometimes in combination with wgrep), as well replace-regexp for plain search & replace, and while they all overlap, none are poor versions of any of the others. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. However it's vanishingly rare that I use macros any more.)

There is a multiple cursors plugin for vim that I use; it's a bit clunky at times, but it does the job. How is kakoune's multiple cursors support better than that? How cool is it, so to speak?

Btw the reason I haven't tried kakoune yet is that the command is `kak`, which means 'shit' in my native language, Dutch.

>There is a multiple cursors plugin for vim that I use; it's a bit clunky at times, but it does the job. How is kakoune's multiple cursors support better than that? How cool is it, so to speak?

I haven't used the vim plugin but if vim commands work on each selection that probably gets you half way. Kakoune additionally provides 's' and 'S' commands to sub select down from your selection iteratively. you might select all words, then select the _ in each word, delete the character and hit ~ to capitalize the next character to convert a selection of words in snake_case to camelCase. I think it's cool.

>Btw the reason I haven't tried kakoune yet is that the command is `kak`, which means 'shit' in my native language, Dutch.

I've actually heard this either on a forum, mailing list or a github issue at least once, lol. It's unfortunate.

>> Btw the reason I haven't tried kakoune yet is that the command is `kak`, which means 'shit' in my native language, Dutch.

> I've actually heard this either on a forum, mailing list or a github issue at least once, lol. It's unfortunate.

I think if someone really wants to use Kakoune they could do the same thing that I do with neovim, which is to make vim be an alias for the editor you actually want to use.

Speaking of unfortunate naming: 'bash' is pronounced exactly like the Norwegian word 'bæsj', which also means shit/poop. This has been the cause of some hilarious situations where non-technical people have overheard a nerdy conversation

As a norwegian, this is a contributing factor to me using zsh

I think more than anything, you've convinced me that I'm probably never switching to Vim. I've really considered it because a lot of people I've worked with use it and claim it makes them much more productive, but I've been pretty productive in my IDE and I've been doing all those multiple selection and "scripting" type things in Sublime and IntelliJ for years.

Before 3 yeas of kakoune, I did like 20 years of Vim. IMO, typing is less than 0.1% of SWE, so even if you can get 2x typing productivity with Vim it will still not amount to any substantial overall productivity benefit.

If IDE works for you and you enjoy it, stick with it. I enjoy modal editing (Vim/kak) because it feels good. I don't have to move my hands from the home row and I'm a damn impatient person, so that fast editing just makes me feel a little better about "waiting for IO".

> I guess the big difference is multiple selections. In Kakoune Normal mode you can select multiple selections, and your normal mode commands operate on all those selections at once, and if you switch to insert mode you can insert text at all of those multiple cursors.

This is why I switched to vis (https://github.com/martanne/vis) after trying kak for a couple days (and previously being an nvim user). ^k and ^j add cursors directly above and below the current one, :x/foo/ selects all occurrences of ‘foo’ in the current selection or (if there’s no current selection) file (this is based on the command language of Rob Pike’s `sam` editor, and foo can be a structural regex), and then you can manipulate them using standard vi bindings.

Editing in Vim feels like a bit like editing in `ed` if you ever tried it. It's a bit like "type in a command, and see the result". You type d3w and you will get 3 word deleted. In Kakoune every keypress results in visual response. You type 3w, you see that 3 words were selected, then you hit d and they get deleted. It makes editing much more interactive, smooth and less error prone.

Unlike the other responder, I am actually not big fan of multiple selections and prefer search and replace. But once in a while multiple selections come handy even for me, so I don't mind them being there.

Your comment will save me a lot of time. Thank you.

If it's so painful for you, maybe try dropping the IDEs and web editors? To be clear I know that there's nothing wrong with liking IDEs, I'm not that much of a purist, but there's also nothing wrong with not using them. Over the past decade I've worked with all kinds of technologies, from the web to bootloaders, from Perl to Rust and I've done it all without using any IDE.

Again, I'm not advocating against IDEs out of principle, it's just that if your current setup is so frustrating for you at the moment I really think you should consider something a bit radical to improve it. When something in my code workflow feels "sticky" I always find that it's worth taking the time to find a solution, after all we spend so much time using these tools...

I personalty use both types. IDEs have their place. So do the 'minimal' editors. The biggest gripe I have with modal editors like vim is they seem to adhere to the path of most surprise instead of least. With most IDEs they try to get you into moving text into a file quickly. A modal editor you first have to learn how to just change modes. I can not number the amount of times I started typing and had the conclusion 'I have no idea what I just did to my document and what state the editor is in now'. Which is maximum surprise :) I get why they were made in the first place. They are a thing of teletype machines. Yet we keep this mode style editor around. It is interesting. I personally am kind of stuck with this right now due to the way my work manages machines. So I am stuck with whatever the box has on it. So minimal customization is allowed.

There's definitely a steeper learning curve to modal editor, that's for sure. And vim is pretty bad at communicating what state it's on, especially with the default config.

But my point is not so much about modality (I used emacs for a very long time before switching to vim) it's more that the parent seems to really like this kakoune editor, so why wouldn't he just use it full time instead of switching constantly?

> I spend the majority of my work days using Vim keys for editing text, and there is an editing style I'd actually prefer to use but I can't because there isn't already widespread adoption.

Unless your preferred style has some really unusual key combos, it seems to me that most IDEs and editors today enable you to configure your keys just the way you want them.

You might not realize that when it comes to vi keys, or I assume (per context) Kakoune -- it's the ability to compose commands out of smaller bits. If the editor doesn't support the appropriate composition elements, you can't get there with simple key-remappings, for even if you (vi-wise) tell it 'dd' deletes a line, that won't get you 'd$' for delete-to-end of line, 'df)' for delete-to-next-parenthesis, etc.

More in-depth commentary: https://medium.com/@mkozlows/why-atom-cant-replace-vim-43385...

Sadly, because I'm someone who learned vi in part because it's nearly everywhere and fits on the embedded devices I often develop for easily, a new editor isn't as interesting because it isn't everywhere.

Ah, I see the problem. Thanks!

Applications that are not integrated into Emacs sometimes implement 'vim keys' for interface. If you get used to kakoune keys, you may struggle each time you use them.

D and C (shift + d/c) also delete to the end of the line (at least in vis and vim.tiny), by the way.

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