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> It also improves on vi's commands syntax I've never used Kakoune, but reading about it I'm not sure it's an improvement. One powerful vi feature is the dot

• chongli 6y ago
  I have used Kakoune. I tried it out pretty extensively for a few weeks. I could not get comfortable with it. I've used vi and vim for two decades now. Kakoune seems like it would appeal to people who have moderate exposure to vi/vim but not mastery. From the mastery standpoint, Kakoune seems like a big step down from the vi model. Too many of its commands/selections seemed to give priority to the edge case over the central one. Most of the text editing I've ever done with vi is of the garden-variety "navigate to this line and insert/delete/change one thing". Kakoune makes this more difficult by creating multiple cursors/selections as a side effect of its movement/navigation tools. It's like Kakoune is trying to tell me "no, you want to edit stuff all over the place!" I also think the promise of Kakoune, that you can use selections to see what will happen before you type the command to actually make the change, is violated when there are selections outside of the visible portion of the file. Furthermore, with vi/vim I tend to type commands so quickly that the visual nature of Kakoune would only slow me down, and so at that point the advantage of selections is greatly diminished.
  • rrose 6y ago
    I used to use multiple cursors in sublime before i switched to vim, and 99% of the time the thing i wanted to accomplish with multiple cursors could be done easily with :s/pattern/replacement/ or some variant of that. Then I switched to neovim and got :set inccommand, which visually shows you the replacement as you type it, which feels like it accomplishes what multiple cursors/multiple selections is trying for
  • jasone 6y ago
    Counterpoint: I have used Kakoune for a year now, immediately following sixteen years of heavy vim use. I find Kakoune far more intuitive than vim, because the feature set composes so well. Within the first few weeks I understood the command set well enough to combine features to solve editing problems I would have had to look up solutions to if using vim. Regarding the worry of visual distraction of selections slowing down editing, I found the opposite to be the case as I became more fluent with Kakoune. Motions modify the selection, and it is quite common for the selection to serendipitously contain what I want to modify. Constantly visible selection(s) lead me to implicitly take advantage of motion and use fewer keystrokes. Regarding multiple selections outside the visible window, you are right that there's no visual feedback for those selections, which is a degraded experience compared to when all selections are visible. But that's no worse than the experience of a global search/replace in vim. You are arguing that in an edge case, Kakoune is no better than vim, which doesn't seem like a meaningful detraction.
    • chongli 6y ago
      visual distraction of selections slowing down editing This is going to be a dealbreaker because having things moving around in one's peripheral vision is extremely distracting for a lot of people, including me. When I am typing I want my focus to be on the one place where I'm inserting text. I don't want to see all these other cursors moving around. But that's no worse than the experience of a global search/replace in vim I rarely ever use the default global search/replace in vim. Most of the time I search with / and then perform an edit there, and then use n.n.n.nn.nnn. to repeat the changes in the places I want.