Comment by raiguard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raiguard | Hacker News Reader

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I've been using Kakoune as my daily driver for almost a year. The thing that made me fall in love was the simplicity, both in daily usage and in extensibility.

The biggest "oh wow" moment for me was how easy it was to create a color scheme. In Vim, creating your own color scheme is potentially a huge ordeal, with many edge cases. For example, vim-one's color scheme file is over 800 lines long.

By contrast, I created a fully functional Kakoune color scheme in only 84 lines, 60 lines if I remove extraneous spacing and comments. There is no conditional logic, no legacy support, just one set of standard "faces" that work everywhere. All languages use the same standard set of faces to do their syntax highlighting. The difference that makes is astounding.

This is but one example of Kakoune's orthogonality and simplicity of design. Coming from Vim, which is chock full of legacy code and an inconsistent mess of configuration, it's a breath of fresh air.

I would have thought that creating/adapting a colour scheme is a onetime activity when you start using the editor for your language. Do you update the colour scheme regularly?

I used color schemes as an example, perhaps it was a bad one. I don't update it regularly, no.

As others have said, the appeal of Kak is orthogonality and accessibility. The keybindings are sensibly organized, there is exhaustive autocomplete and on screen documentation, and the configuration language is simple. It is ridiculously easy to write plugins for, because you can use shell scripting, or create a program in any language you want and invoke it from a shell block. Kakoune's LSP plugin is written in Rust and communicates with Kak via the shell.

Sorry if it looks like I was being flippant. I wasn't. I had some colleagues in the past that did adjust their colour scheme almost monthly. I think it was when syntax highlight first came onto the scene back in the mid 90s.

Oh you're fine! I didn't think you were being flippant. I've been using One Darker (One Dark with a darker background) for two years and don't have any plans to change anytime soon. Here's the source for the theme if you're interested. It has gotten a little bit more complex than I described in my post, due to supporting various plugins, but it's still pretty easy to understand.

https://github.com/raiguard/one.kak/blob/main/colors/one-dar...

I think he gave that as an illustrative point about the simplicity of Kakoune, rather than saying this specific example is why he uses it.

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