Hacker News Reader

Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

Kate has the best VI command emulator out there bar none and got a lot more usable for a lot of stuff when it added LSP support.

Kate is the core editor of KDevelop IDE too.

https://www.kdevelop.org/

View on HN

I second that. I almost switched from vim to Kate. I do use the undecorated/non-IDE Kate version called "KWrite" which is the only no nonsense totally usable basic GUI editor with a vim mode. I can quickly write my notes and edit them the vim way and have a regular copy paste experience in the same time. Love it.

Really? Bar none? Better than evil?

Hard to imagine that's possible, since evil is already better than vim.

What makes Evil better than Vim in your experience?

Better configuration language. For instance

    (define-key evil-normal-state-map " " "@q")

    noremap <Space> @q

I know it's subjective and some people will say the later is better because it's shorter, but I greatly prefer the first. It's very descriptive, I can tell exactly what it does just by reading it. The vim version... "no remap"? I know it means "Normal Recursive Map", but that's not the way it reads unless you already know what it does. Vim just has a bewildering array of such things, noremap, nnoremap, vnnoremap, znormap, xnoremap, snoremap, onoremap, tnoremap... one of those is fake and you probably can't tell which.

Basically, vim has an old-school unix culture of naming things, while emacs has a lisp culture of naming things. Considering both these editors now come with powerful completion features that make it easy to type long symbol names, I think the lisp approach is the correct one.

I tried to like vimscript. Tried for nearly 15 years. When I finally took the plunge and switched to evil mode it was like a breath of fresh air, and I was left wondering why I hadn't switched years earlier.

You can effortlessly configure Neovim with Fennel nowadays.

This is a good example: https://github.com/nyoom-engineering/nyoom.nvim

The one trade-off is that it's not the first class language, so you still have to mentally translate from Lua to Fennel sometimes.

That's it? Just the configuration method? I thought you would go over a bunch of things that cannot be done in vim, but is possible with evil. And all I got was configuration language. And key remapping for that.

Disappointing.

Discussions about text editors are always useless... people express their opinion as if they were completely objective, but when pressed to explain it they come up with the most ridiculous little things. We should just all recognize it's all subjective preference.

One feature I really liked when I used evil, which wasn't present in vim, was search/replace with `s/` replicated the case in the replacement string. So `s/one/two/` would replace `One` with `Two`.

Great when you want to refactor a name that's used both as a variable and a CONSTANT in one go.

That's available in vim via the vim-abolish[0] plugin... which has other capabilities, but the one I take advantage of is case-preserving S/one/two/ which does what you want.

It's odd vim doesn't have that builtin, I'm half convinced it does and I just haven't dug enough to find it.

[0] https://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish

The editor component is also used in KWrite if you want a more minimal editor. I don't really use Kate itself but really like both KWrite and KDevelop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com