Mawww's experiment for a better code editor

I'm no developer but I've been using kakoune for editing for the past month or two and the experience is very good. Mawww has been working on the editor for the past 3 years so it's in a pretty good shape. Programming-wise there's syntax highlighting for many languages already, check out https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/tree/master/rc for a list. Adding a basic syntax highlighter is simple enough as well. IDE-wise you'll get the best experience when writing c/c++ I think as the author does that and put a lot of effort in it running smoothly. Editing-wise I like the features more than vim's or emacs'. Working with multiple selections is very effective, fast and fun. Stability-wise I don't think you have to worry too much anymore, there's occasional bugs that are fixed very quickly and the key bindings are pretty much set (there's a minor change every now and then when implementing new bindings but nothing major). Customizing-wise there's enough options and they are quite well thought out. There's no vimscript or elisp, for the design choices check out https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/blob/master/doc/design.asci... . The author is also very responsive to suggestions and is implementing features the users are asking for (if they make sense and conform to the design of course).

Hello, glad you enjoyed your first contacts. I have been using Kakoune not only to write itself, but as my only code editor in my day time job (C++ video game coding) as well for the last 3 years. I consider it stable, definitely not alpha, every major features are implemented (with maybe the exception of folding) and while breaking changes happen from time to time (some key binding change mainly), they are very rare, and usually discussed on IRC beforehand.

While I agree a proper release would be neat, at the moment keeping a stable master branch, and opening topic branches for disruptive work does the trick. Most of the time, I do not push any commit before having spent a day at work with that code, making sure I do not hit any problems in my workflow. Still a long way from proper testing.

So yeah, Kakoune is definitely useable for day to day work, with quite strong support for C++ (clang support for completion and diagnostics) as it is the language I mostly use.

Any feedback is appreciated !

Emacs has evil-mode which implements vim's bindings so of course this can be done. Give it a spin though, you might find that some of your customization isn't even needed here, the design is very clean and composable, even more than vim's I'd say.

Thank you, that's very much in line with what I think the future of computing will look like. I especially like the idea of using a mouse (or other analog input device, probably touch or motion detection in the near future) in place of normal/insertion mode, and then executing text commands like they are a link in a web browser (based on their format).

Once I got past trying to remember the commands, it was uncanny how the actions the narrator executed were extensions of how I work going back and forth from my (sort of rigid IDE) to a regex tool like TextWrangler. I get away with this inefficiency currently because I do very little typing and let commands do the heavy lifting, but getting rid of that last bit of friction would be nice.