12 ms·

Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor (2016)

179 points by r3trohack3r 3y ago

zokier 3y ago
If kakoune sparks your interest, you might also want to check out Helix, a new editor inspired by Kakoune in some parts
- jeltz 3y ago
  What does Helix do that Kakoune doesn't?
  - lwhsiao 3y ago
    From: https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/ > Mainly by having more things built-in. Kakoune is composable by design, relying on external tooling to manage splits and provide language server support. Helix instead chooses to integrate more. We also use tree-sitter for highlighting and code analysis.
  - tester457 3y ago
    Here's a good comparison of the two. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29976369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29976369
  - cosmojg 3y ago
    A prominent Kakoune contributor wrote up a great blog post exploring that question here: https://phaazon.net/blog/more-hindsight-vim-helix-kakoune https://phaazon.net/blog/more-hindsight-vim-helix-kakoune
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    I switched from Kakoune to Helix after using Kakoune for a few years. Helix, to me, is everything i loved about Kakoune but with better defaults. It being in a language i love also is fun, as i almost immediately forked it and changed a few things - handy when they're still figuring out plugins.
  - eviks 3y ago
    Works on Windows
- dang 3y ago
  Discussed a few times: More hindsight on Vim, helix and kakoune - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36066347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36066347 - May 2023 (1 comment) Helix 23.03 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35384691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35384691 - March 2023 (93 comments) Helix 22.12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33890655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33890655 - Dec 2022 (40 comments) Helix: Post-Modern Text Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33494840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33494840 - Nov 2022 (166 comments) Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33147270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33147270 - Oct 2022 (306 comments) Helix: A post-modern text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33039390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33039390 - Sept 2022 (2 comments) Helix, Terminal Modal Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847041 - March 2022 (2 comments) Helix 0.5 released (Kakoune like terminal text editor) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043889 - Oct 2021 (2 comments) Helix: a post-modern modal text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479 - June 2021 (365 comments)
- aidenn0 3y ago
  FWIW: I tried Helix maybe about 6 months ago. It was pretty good, but there were things I do regularly in vim that I couldn't do in Helix, and the obvious way to do it in Helix didn't work (but it did in Kakoune when I tried that). I mentioned this on whatever chat was listed on Helix's website as the place to go, and everyone there was open to making the obvious thing work, so I'm guessing Helix will get there at some point, but I don't want to use it now. Certainly given the relative momentum of the two projects Helix should get there some day.
- extr 3y ago
  Helix is awesome but have been disappointed by the core devs stance toward integrating some form of copilot. It's really difficult to use an editor that doesn't support it at this point.
  - lytedev 3y ago
    What stance is that? Last I checked they were still figuring out how to extend the editor in general. Reading this thread, I really like the idea of an IPC mechanism like Kakoune uses (and Neovim has IIRC) If this were the case, integrating copilot or other ao tools would become pretty straightforward!
    - extr 3y ago
      Yeah, that's basically the case. They don't have a plugin system, afaik it's still in the planning phase. They have LSP support, but copilot is a non-standard kind of LSP, and last time I looked the devs weren't interested in doing the integration work needed to get it all working nicely. Can't say I blame them, it's their project after all. Just frustrating because I would totally use helix if not for the lack of that one feature. I actually still use it, but just as a quick way to make edits in the CLI, and not for full time dev. It's a great editor and project nonetheless.
- wkdneidbwf 3y ago
  Came to post this myself. What I love about Helix is that it just works out of the box. Install your toolchain and LSP and off you go. I absolutely do not want to have to write my own Vim config, or install some tool that configures a ton of stuff I don't understand.
behnamoh 3y ago
With recent integration of Copilot Chat in vscode, I’m less inclined to use Neovim or any terminal based editor. I think terminals had a time and place, but it’s time we moved on to tools that are more user friendly and provide better features.
- imbnwa 3y ago
  TUI vs GUI seems orthogonal here, there are Copilot plugins for Neovim. Microsoft deciding what capabilities to make exclusive to its editor GUI is just vendor lock-in, not a fundamental refutation of the paradigm of modal TUI editors.
- tester457 3y ago
  There's no reason why GUI tools can't embrace modal editing.
  - steve_taylor 3y ago
    Also no reason terminal editors have to be modal, e.g. pico/nano
- acaloiar 3y ago
  > I think terminals had a time and place, but it’s time we moved on to tools that are more user friendly and provide better features. The terminal is not an impediment to "better features", and "user friendliness" is purely a subjective matter. I find VSCode deeply unfriendly to my preferred method of editing code, and I imagine VSCode users find vim, kakoune, and emacs similarly unfriendly to their preferred method of editing code. Nobody is wrong in their findings -- what one finds unfriendly is objectively true to them. But to say that I find VSCode deeply unfriendly is it not the same as your implying that terminals preclude "better" features and user friendliness. I'm simply recognizing preference, while what what you're saying seems to discount my (and that of many others) preference. [edited for grammar and clarity]
- davidatbu 3y ago
  I just skimmed the release blog post for Copilot Chat, and I don't see why it can't be implemented in a terminal based editor. Copilot itself was.
imbnwa 3y ago
I have tried my hand at Helix, a Kakoune-derivative, but I'm immensely bothered by the selection re-drawing as I move around: it creates visual noise. When I move, I just want to move; when I act, I just want to act. The problem of "maybe I wanted to delete 4 rather than 5 words" tends to not come up often enough to demand a solution as common programming notational practice tends to establish very obvious boundaries, e.g. df= (delete to the assignment operator), dfP (delete to first capital P, where maybe I'm renaming a method getFilePath with my cursor on the character 't'), d$ (delete to end of line), etc
Conscat 3y ago
I primarily used Kakoune for 2 months a few years ago. I loved its featureful regex engine which made certain macros much MUCH easier to write than Emacs functions. I also loved the selection-first editing model and have reimplemented that in Emacs and VS Code. But Kakoune was far too basic for me to get much serious C++ work done. You have to use external TUIs and CLIs constantly, and obviously those all have no integration with your Kakoune configuration.
bee_rider 3y ago
The site makes a surprisingly compelling pitch to me, a grumpy and set in his ways vim/Linux user. But, I don’t know. It is hard to overcome the fact that vi clones have been around for a bazillion years, will almost certainly outlive all of us, and will always be in every repo.
- Y_Y 3y ago
  I don't usually feel the need to spread religious truths to the masses, but I'd be happy to know to that it was because of me that someone learned that the best vi(m) really is emacs in evil-mode.
  - throwawayixnay 3y ago
    [dead]
- zamalek 3y ago
  > vi clones This is the problem with moving off vi motions: you can get vi motions almost everywhere. Jetbrains, check, Visual Studio, check, vscode, check, sublime, check, firefox, check. The best I found for Kakoune (which I do significantly prefer) was an approximation of it for vscode, and nothing else.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I tried vim bindings in VSCode but I couldn’t stand them, it was right inside the uncanny valley for me.
    - Sirenos 3y ago
      What didn't you like about it?
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        Typically I use vim+tmux, so I should have also probably set up some additional extension to add a tmux-like panel change shortcut, so I could save-and-run like I normally would on the command line. It also didn’t seem to handle Jupyter cells well. I forget exactly, but sometimes it would jump from one panel to another instead I think?
chongli 3y ago
I spent a while trying Kakoune years ago and I have one minor complaint and one major complaint. Leading off with the minor complaint (because it’s more annoying than severe): it is designed for multiple cursors editing as the default, rather than single. That is, many of the normal movement operations (such as search) have the side effect of leaving behind extra cursors, like little breadcrumbs, that take an extra keystroke to dismiss. Perhaps this makes sense for people who spend all day doing large-scale edits on highly structured files but it makes no sense for the kind of everyday editing that I do. Most of my time is spent either entering brand new text in bulk at the end of the file, or jumping around and making one-off changes via searching. When I want to do larger scale edits (I use vim, the editor kak was intended to succeed), I reach for :%s///gc to do confirmation-based global substitutions (or sometimes :g//s///gc instead of %s). So I really don’t see the advantage of the multiple cursors approach, especially given that the files I’m working with are thousands of lines long. That is far too long to get any visual feedback benefit to using multiple cursors for whole-file substitutions. Now on to the major complaint. For some reason, the developers decided to buck the trend of plugin-based editors by not including a built-in scripting language with a nice API. Instead, people wanting to extend Kakoune are expected to write bash scripts (!?). Sorry, this is a colossal mistake that dooms the editor to irrelevance for the foreseeable future. They would have been far better off just picking a nice scripting language (how about Python, Ruby, or Lua) and building a really clean, sensible API for it. Bonus points for building in a package manager that can browse, fetch, install, and update plugins automatically. This is the one massive area of weakness for vim (VimScript? Ugh!) and they missed the boat!
- skribanto 3y ago
  As an alternative to gc you can page through selections with parens and alt-space to dismiss individual selections. its also easier to compose filters, eg matching all lines that contain regex A and B regardless of order. doing that with vim regex is kind of annoying and it gets programming worse the more filters you need to add Also its not bash specifically. You can send kak commands to the kak session from any programming language. As an example kak-lsp is in rust
  - 3y ago
dang 3y ago
Related: Kakoune Code Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29975052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29975052 - Jan 2022 (170 comments) Kakoune, a punk-rock text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716187 - Oct 2020 (2 comments) What you could steal from the Kakoune code editor, and get away with - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24685267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24685267 - Oct 2020 (94 comments) Kakoune – A Modal Text Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313794 - March 2019 (58 comments) Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17781780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17781780 - Aug 2018 (45 comments) Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165919 - Dec 2016 (327 comments) Kakoune: a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152499 - Dec 2016 (2 comments) Kakoune – An experiment for a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10484653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10484653 - Oct 2015 (34 comments) Mawww's experiment for a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764028 - June 2015 (15 comments)
pizzalife 3y ago
Anyone know the font in those videos? I think it looks pretty good.
- vivty 3y ago
  Seems to be https://github.com/zshoals/Dina-Font-TTF-Remastered https://github.com/zshoals/Dina-Font-TTF-Remastered. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/kakoune/comments/rixopl/do_you_know_what_the_font_is_in_the_screenshots/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kakoune/comments/rixopl/do_you_know...
  - pizzalife 3y ago
    Thanks!
ufo 3y ago
I love kakoune's client-server design. I can open multiple terminal windows instead of terminal splits and panes (which I can never remember the shortcuts). My main gripe is the extension model. Plugins run in a separate process which interacts with the editor by printing kakoune commands to standard output. Marshalling data and proper string escaping is a pain. Not to mention that many plugins are in bash, because it's the minimum common denominator.
galkk 3y ago
I find this part very compelling vi basic grammar is verb followed by object; it’s nice because it matches well with the order we use in English, "delete word". On the other hand, it does not match well with the nature of what we express: There is only a handful of verbs in text editing (delete, yank, paste, insert… ), and they don’t compose, contrarily to objects which can be arbitrarily complex, and difficult to express. That means that errors are not handled well. If you express your object wrongly with a delete verb, the wrong text will get deleted, you will need to undo, and try again. Kakoune’s grammar is object followed by verb, combined with instantaneous feedback, that means you always see the current object (In Kakoune we call that the selection) before you apply your change, which allows you to correct errors on the go. Unfortunately, I'd rather see this as an alternative input mode in vim/vscode/nvim than separate editor, so I won't need to throw away all knowledge/plugins/dotfiles accumulated over time, than switching to completely new editor. Baggage is hard.
- ambicapter 3y ago
  I love the way he is basically modelling the way we interact with an editor as a grammar, or in mathematical terms. It's so interesting what kinds of designs you can come up with when you can successfully apply a different way of thinking about it.
- celeritascelery 3y ago
  Here is an interesting take on why the kakoune approach may not be an improvement over vim. Definitely well thought out. https://github.com/noctuid/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/editing.org#why-not-kakoune https://github.com/noctuid/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/editin...
  - davidatbu 3y ago
    As a heavy user of neovim who's been curious about the "noun-verb" approach to modal editing, this link was an excellent read!
- nequo 3y ago
  Emacs has Meow which implements model editing with the Kakoune grammar: https://github.com/meow-edit/meow https://github.com/meow-edit/meow
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
I tried using Kakoune as a daily driver for a while. I still bust it out now and then when there's something I want to do that would _really_ benefit from multiple cursors or structured regular expressions, but there's things that made me ditch it as my main editor: 1) Lack of windowing. I understand the pitch of radical simplicity by leaving this to the terminal editor, but it's just annoying as shit trying to write windowing configurations for different terminal editors. Something like making a window split and hopping between them shouldn't feel hacky and weird. 2) Extending the editor with Kakscript. Posix shell scripting is already something I do as little as possible, it's pretty much the worst programming language I can think of. Scripting kakoune uses shell scripting but it's far even worse, you descend into some weird un-debuggable eldritch horror mess of nested blocks of sh and eval mixing shell script semantics with kakoune editor state semantics. Actually editing text with it feels amazing, though. It's like the yin to Emacs' yang.
ltr_ 3y ago
is there a thing like rlwrap or "kakkeys" for zsh (or in the browser like vimium)? i use kak as my main editor, but i don't like to mentally switch to vi keys for anything else every time.
- Conscat 3y ago
  Actually yes. Its named Krabby
- johnd15sp34 3y ago
  for zsh: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki/zsh-zle https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki/zsh-zle
hemogloben 3y ago
Is there a way to get kakoune working inside of JetBrains IDEs? Primarily CLion?
29athrowaway 3y ago
What I like about kakoune is that it suggests commands, making it more discoverable. You can install vim plugins that do this, but kakoune doesn't need configuration to do this. helix is also nice, and inspired by kakoune.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
oscribinn 3y ago
the problem with all these hipster vims is that it's too late in the game, vi is everywhere you're going to be remoting into and these are only going to be on your localhost, not even off a fresh install. your muscle memory might as well carry over, same reason evil mode is the only modal extension for emacs that matters and QWERTY is the only keyboard layout for sane people
- offices 3y ago
  That massively depends on how often you remote into machines. It's also the same logic for using bash instead of zsh, a battle that zsh is winning - it turns out that learning one does not prevent learning both.
sebsebmc 3y ago
For those of you that use VS Code, there is a plugin[1] that follow a lot of the Kakoune grammar but doesn't try to emulate fully, opting instead for better integration with vscode. I have been using it for a few years after using Kakoune for a few and then trying and failing to make my own Kakoune emulation mode for vscode. [1]: https://github.com/71/dance https://github.com/71/dance
- ctenb 3y ago
  Using Dance as well for VSCode development. It's decent, albeit that the README could be more helpful.
dang 3y ago
Related ongoing thread: Even more hindsight on Vim, Helix and Kakoune - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36427267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36427267 - June 2023 (3 comments)
tines 3y ago
How do you edit a file on another machine with Kakoune? With emacs you use tramp, for example.
- Conscat 3y ago
  I haven't done this, but I believe you can use Kitty to edit remotely with Kakoune.
timetraveller26 3y ago
Stop trying to make Kakoune happen, it's not going to happen. /s
kmoser 3y ago
Modal editing? Larry Tesler would not have approved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler
- peepee1982 3y ago
  Nah. I don't think so. When it comes to modal workflows, there's a tradeoff to be made between intuitiveness and efficiency that comes with lots of practice. I don't use modal text editors anymore. But I get how modes can be useful and pleasant to have.
- offices 3y ago
  No modes means modifier keys for the most common actions which means Emacs pinky.
usrbinbash 3y ago
Kakoune has some good ideas, eg. piping commands into it and having the editor immediately execute them is a really good one. Reminiscent of acme for Plan9, which exposes virtual files for its buffers and to receive commands, which makes it really convenient to develop tools for it. That all being said, Kakoune simply doesn't offer enough for me to use it over vim. One of the first things I always see presented is multi-line-editing, a feature that could, maybe, come in handy once or twice a month for me. Comparing that to the simple fact that vim matured for over 30 years, and the sheer size of it's ecosystem, and switching to another modal terminal based editor is a really hard sell. The object-verb syntax is a not a selling point to me, because I can have the exact same "preview" effect by using a vim plugin like easymotion: d<leader><leader>w and I can see exactly to where it will delete before any changes happen to the buffer.
vbh21 3y ago
I feel using vim keybindings with VSCode to work best for me, for the work that I do. Having another modal command-line editor like vim just doesn't appeal to me. However, this is a good concept. Having this around over vim, with a well-established and mature ecosystem - is a hard sell.. Good luck.
throwaway71271 3y ago
There is a book from 1984, The Unix Programming Environment, by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike.(https://archive.org/details/UNIXProgrammingEnvironment https://archive.org/details/UNIXProgrammingEnvironment) It is pretty much how I use the computer today, with few improvements with emacs and tmux. As I am teaching my daughter how to use cat/cut/grep etc, I am doing so truly thinking that this is the best way to use a computer in 2023. The other day I was teaching her few shortcuts ^P and so on, I thought that maybe its time to re-think this whole cursor and keybinds thing. With apples vr magic goggles maybe someone can make an editor that I can follow code and write text and have 50 chats with some llm discussing various parts of the code I am working on. All editors are limited by monitor space, the linux kernel style guide still has 80 column recommendation (not a hard limit since 2020), the way we jump into and out of code, or we step into thing, all are very limited and are pretty much the same since 1984. I hope soon we have tooling like in the Hackers movie (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/) and use our eyes more to be able to follow code and systems. The complexity of the systems has increased (e.g. cloud, hundreds of services, even LSP, tons and tons of boilerplate and generated code), but our tools are stuck.

179 points by r3trohack3r 3y ago

zokier 3y ago

If kakoune sparks your interest, you might also want to check out Helix, a new editor inspired by Kakoune in some parts

jeltz 3y ago
What does Helix do that Kakoune doesn't?
- lwhsiao 3y ago
  From: https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/ > Mainly by having more things built-in. Kakoune is composable by design, relying on external tooling to manage splits and provide language server support. Helix instead chooses to integrate more. We also use tree-sitter for highlighting and code analysis.
- tester457 3y ago
  Here's a good comparison of the two. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29976369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29976369
- cosmojg 3y ago
  A prominent Kakoune contributor wrote up a great blog post exploring that question here: https://phaazon.net/blog/more-hindsight-vim-helix-kakoune https://phaazon.net/blog/more-hindsight-vim-helix-kakoune
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  I switched from Kakoune to Helix after using Kakoune for a few years. Helix, to me, is everything i loved about Kakoune but with better defaults. It being in a language i love also is fun, as i almost immediately forked it and changed a few things - handy when they're still figuring out plugins.
- eviks 3y ago
  Works on Windows
dang 3y ago
Discussed a few times: More hindsight on Vim, helix and kakoune - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36066347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36066347 - May 2023 (1 comment) Helix 23.03 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35384691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35384691 - March 2023 (93 comments) Helix 22.12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33890655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33890655 - Dec 2022 (40 comments) Helix: Post-Modern Text Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33494840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33494840 - Nov 2022 (166 comments) Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33147270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33147270 - Oct 2022 (306 comments) Helix: A post-modern text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33039390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33039390 - Sept 2022 (2 comments) Helix, Terminal Modal Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847041 - March 2022 (2 comments) Helix 0.5 released (Kakoune like terminal text editor) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043889 - Oct 2021 (2 comments) Helix: a post-modern modal text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479 - June 2021 (365 comments)
aidenn0 3y ago
FWIW: I tried Helix maybe about 6 months ago. It was pretty good, but there were things I do regularly in vim that I couldn't do in Helix, and the obvious way to do it in Helix didn't work (but it did in Kakoune when I tried that). I mentioned this on whatever chat was listed on Helix's website as the place to go, and everyone there was open to making the obvious thing work, so I'm guessing Helix will get there at some point, but I don't want to use it now. Certainly given the relative momentum of the two projects Helix should get there some day.
extr 3y ago
Helix is awesome but have been disappointed by the core devs stance toward integrating some form of copilot. It's really difficult to use an editor that doesn't support it at this point.
- lytedev 3y ago
  What stance is that? Last I checked they were still figuring out how to extend the editor in general. Reading this thread, I really like the idea of an IPC mechanism like Kakoune uses (and Neovim has IIRC) If this were the case, integrating copilot or other ao tools would become pretty straightforward!
  - extr 3y ago
    Yeah, that's basically the case. They don't have a plugin system, afaik it's still in the planning phase. They have LSP support, but copilot is a non-standard kind of LSP, and last time I looked the devs weren't interested in doing the integration work needed to get it all working nicely. Can't say I blame them, it's their project after all. Just frustrating because I would totally use helix if not for the lack of that one feature. I actually still use it, but just as a quick way to make edits in the CLI, and not for full time dev. It's a great editor and project nonetheless.
wkdneidbwf 3y ago
Came to post this myself. What I love about Helix is that it just works out of the box. Install your toolchain and LSP and off you go. I absolutely do not want to have to write my own Vim config, or install some tool that configures a ton of stuff I don't understand.

behnamoh 3y ago

With recent integration of Copilot Chat in vscode, I’m less inclined to use Neovim or any terminal based editor. I think terminals had a time and place, but it’s time we moved on to tools that are more user friendly and provide better features.

imbnwa 3y ago
TUI vs GUI seems orthogonal here, there are Copilot plugins for Neovim. Microsoft deciding what capabilities to make exclusive to its editor GUI is just vendor lock-in, not a fundamental refutation of the paradigm of modal TUI editors.
tester457 3y ago
There's no reason why GUI tools can't embrace modal editing.
- steve_taylor 3y ago
  Also no reason terminal editors have to be modal, e.g. pico/nano
acaloiar 3y ago
> I think terminals had a time and place, but it’s time we moved on to tools that are more user friendly and provide better features. The terminal is not an impediment to "better features", and "user friendliness" is purely a subjective matter. I find VSCode deeply unfriendly to my preferred method of editing code, and I imagine VSCode users find vim, kakoune, and emacs similarly unfriendly to their preferred method of editing code. Nobody is wrong in their findings -- what one finds unfriendly is objectively true to them. But to say that I find VSCode deeply unfriendly is it not the same as your implying that terminals preclude "better" features and user friendliness. I'm simply recognizing preference, while what what you're saying seems to discount my (and that of many others) preference. [edited for grammar and clarity]
davidatbu 3y ago
I just skimmed the release blog post for Copilot Chat, and I don't see why it can't be implemented in a terminal based editor. Copilot itself was.

imbnwa 3y ago

I have tried my hand at Helix, a Kakoune-derivative, but I'm immensely bothered by the selection re-drawing as I move around: it creates visual noise. When I move, I just want to move; when I act, I just want to act. The problem of "maybe I wanted to delete 4 rather than 5 words" tends to not come up often enough to demand a solution as common programming notational practice tends to establish very obvious boundaries, e.g. df= (delete to the assignment operator), dfP (delete to first capital P, where maybe I'm renaming a method getFilePath with my cursor on the character 't'), d$ (delete to end of line), etc

Conscat 3y ago

I primarily used Kakoune for 2 months a few years ago. I loved its featureful regex engine which made certain macros much MUCH easier to write than Emacs functions. I also loved the selection-first editing model and have reimplemented that in Emacs and VS Code. But Kakoune was far too basic for me to get much serious C++ work done. You have to use external TUIs and CLIs constantly, and obviously those all have no integration with your Kakoune configuration.

bee_rider 3y ago

The site makes a surprisingly compelling pitch to me, a grumpy and set in his ways vim/Linux user. But, I don’t know. It is hard to overcome the fact that vi clones have been around for a bazillion years, will almost certainly outlive all of us, and will always be in every repo.

Y_Y 3y ago
I don't usually feel the need to spread religious truths to the masses, but I'd be happy to know to that it was because of me that someone learned that the best vi(m) really is emacs in evil-mode.
- throwawayixnay 3y ago
  [dead]
zamalek 3y ago
> vi clones This is the problem with moving off vi motions: you can get vi motions almost everywhere. Jetbrains, check, Visual Studio, check, vscode, check, sublime, check, firefox, check. The best I found for Kakoune (which I do significantly prefer) was an approximation of it for vscode, and nothing else.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I tried vim bindings in VSCode but I couldn’t stand them, it was right inside the uncanny valley for me.
  - Sirenos 3y ago
    What didn't you like about it?
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Typically I use vim+tmux, so I should have also probably set up some additional extension to add a tmux-like panel change shortcut, so I could save-and-run like I normally would on the command line. It also didn’t seem to handle Jupyter cells well. I forget exactly, but sometimes it would jump from one panel to another instead I think?

chongli 3y ago

I spent a while trying Kakoune years ago and I have one minor complaint and one major complaint. Leading off with the minor complaint (because it’s more annoying than severe): it is designed for multiple cursors editing as the default, rather than single. That is, many of the normal movement operations (such as search) have the side effect of leaving behind extra cursors, like little breadcrumbs, that take an extra keystroke to dismiss. Perhaps this makes sense for people who spend all day doing large-scale edits on highly structured files but it makes no sense for the kind of everyday editing that I do. Most of my time is spent either entering brand new text in bulk at the end of the file, or jumping around and making one-off changes via searching. When I want to do larger scale edits (I use vim, the editor kak was intended to succeed), I reach for :%s///gc to do confirmation-based global substitutions (or sometimes :g//s///gc instead of %s). So I really don’t see the advantage of the multiple cursors approach, especially given that the files I’m working with are thousands of lines long. That is far too long to get any visual feedback benefit to using multiple cursors for whole-file substitutions. Now on to the major complaint. For some reason, the developers decided to buck the trend of plugin-based editors by not including a built-in scripting language with a nice API. Instead, people wanting to extend Kakoune are expected to write bash scripts (!?). Sorry, this is a colossal mistake that dooms the editor to irrelevance for the foreseeable future. They would have been far better off just picking a nice scripting language (how about Python, Ruby, or Lua) and building a really clean, sensible API for it. Bonus points for building in a package manager that can browse, fetch, install, and update plugins automatically. This is the one massive area of weakness for vim (VimScript? Ugh!) and they missed the boat!

skribanto 3y ago
As an alternative to gc you can page through selections with parens and alt-space to dismiss individual selections. its also easier to compose filters, eg matching all lines that contain regex A and B regardless of order. doing that with vim regex is kind of annoying and it gets programming worse the more filters you need to add Also its not bash specifically. You can send kak commands to the kak session from any programming language. As an example kak-lsp is in rust
- 3y ago

dang 3y ago

Related: Kakoune Code Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29975052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29975052 - Jan 2022 (170 comments) Kakoune, a punk-rock text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716187 - Oct 2020 (2 comments) What you could steal from the Kakoune code editor, and get away with - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24685267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24685267 - Oct 2020 (94 comments) Kakoune – A Modal Text Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313794 - March 2019 (58 comments) Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17781780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17781780 - Aug 2018 (45 comments) Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165919 - Dec 2016 (327 comments) Kakoune: a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152499 - Dec 2016 (2 comments) Kakoune – An experiment for a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10484653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10484653 - Oct 2015 (34 comments) Mawww's experiment for a better code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764028 - June 2015 (15 comments)

pizzalife 3y ago

Anyone know the font in those videos? I think it looks pretty good.

vivty 3y ago
Seems to be https://github.com/zshoals/Dina-Font-TTF-Remastered https://github.com/zshoals/Dina-Font-TTF-Remastered. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/kakoune/comments/rixopl/do_you_know_what_the_font_is_in_the_screenshots/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kakoune/comments/rixopl/do_you_know...
- pizzalife 3y ago
  Thanks!

ufo 3y ago

I love kakoune's client-server design. I can open multiple terminal windows instead of terminal splits and panes (which I can never remember the shortcuts). My main gripe is the extension model. Plugins run in a separate process which interacts with the editor by printing kakoune commands to standard output. Marshalling data and proper string escaping is a pain. Not to mention that many plugins are in bash, because it's the minimum common denominator.

galkk 3y ago

I find this part very compelling vi basic grammar is verb followed by object; it’s nice because it matches well with the order we use in English, "delete word". On the other hand, it does not match well with the nature of what we express: There is only a handful of verbs in text editing (delete, yank, paste, insert… ), and they don’t compose, contrarily to objects which can be arbitrarily complex, and difficult to express. That means that errors are not handled well. If you express your object wrongly with a delete verb, the wrong text will get deleted, you will need to undo, and try again. Kakoune’s grammar is object followed by verb, combined with instantaneous feedback, that means you always see the current object (In Kakoune we call that the selection) before you apply your change, which allows you to correct errors on the go. Unfortunately, I'd rather see this as an alternative input mode in vim/vscode/nvim than separate editor, so I won't need to throw away all knowledge/plugins/dotfiles accumulated over time, than switching to completely new editor. Baggage is hard.

ambicapter 3y ago
I love the way he is basically modelling the way we interact with an editor as a grammar, or in mathematical terms. It's so interesting what kinds of designs you can come up with when you can successfully apply a different way of thinking about it.
celeritascelery 3y ago
Here is an interesting take on why the kakoune approach may not be an improvement over vim. Definitely well thought out. https://github.com/noctuid/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/editing.org#why-not-kakoune https://github.com/noctuid/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/editin...
- davidatbu 3y ago
  As a heavy user of neovim who's been curious about the "noun-verb" approach to modal editing, this link was an excellent read!
nequo 3y ago
Emacs has Meow which implements model editing with the Kakoune grammar: https://github.com/meow-edit/meow https://github.com/meow-edit/meow

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

I tried using Kakoune as a daily driver for a while. I still bust it out now and then when there's something I want to do that would _really_ benefit from multiple cursors or structured regular expressions, but there's things that made me ditch it as my main editor: 1) Lack of windowing. I understand the pitch of radical simplicity by leaving this to the terminal editor, but it's just annoying as shit trying to write windowing configurations for different terminal editors. Something like making a window split and hopping between them shouldn't feel hacky and weird. 2) Extending the editor with Kakscript. Posix shell scripting is already something I do as little as possible, it's pretty much the worst programming language I can think of. Scripting kakoune uses shell scripting but it's far even worse, you descend into some weird un-debuggable eldritch horror mess of nested blocks of sh and eval mixing shell script semantics with kakoune editor state semantics. Actually editing text with it feels amazing, though. It's like the yin to Emacs' yang.

ltr_ 3y ago

is there a thing like rlwrap or "kakkeys" for zsh (or in the browser like vimium)? i use kak as my main editor, but i don't like to mentally switch to vi keys for anything else every time.

Conscat 3y ago
Actually yes. Its named Krabby
johnd15sp34 3y ago
for zsh: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki/zsh-zle https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki/zsh-zle

hemogloben 3y ago

Is there a way to get kakoune working inside of JetBrains IDEs? Primarily CLion?

29athrowaway 3y ago

What I like about kakoune is that it suggests commands, making it more discoverable. You can install vim plugins that do this, but kakoune doesn't need configuration to do this. helix is also nice, and inspired by kakoune.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

oscribinn 3y ago

the problem with all these hipster vims is that it's too late in the game, vi is everywhere you're going to be remoting into and these are only going to be on your localhost, not even off a fresh install. your muscle memory might as well carry over, same reason evil mode is the only modal extension for emacs that matters and QWERTY is the only keyboard layout for sane people

offices 3y ago
That massively depends on how often you remote into machines. It's also the same logic for using bash instead of zsh, a battle that zsh is winning - it turns out that learning one does not prevent learning both.

sebsebmc 3y ago

For those of you that use VS Code, there is a plugin[1] that follow a lot of the Kakoune grammar but doesn't try to emulate fully, opting instead for better integration with vscode. I have been using it for a few years after using Kakoune for a few and then trying and failing to make my own Kakoune emulation mode for vscode. [1]: https://github.com/71/dance https://github.com/71/dance

ctenb 3y ago
Using Dance as well for VSCode development. It's decent, albeit that the README could be more helpful.

dang 3y ago

Related ongoing thread: Even more hindsight on Vim, Helix and Kakoune - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36427267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36427267 - June 2023 (3 comments)

tines 3y ago

How do you edit a file on another machine with Kakoune? With emacs you use tramp, for example.

Conscat 3y ago
I haven't done this, but I believe you can use Kitty to edit remotely with Kakoune.

timetraveller26 3y ago

Stop trying to make Kakoune happen, it's not going to happen. /s

kmoser 3y ago

Modal editing? Larry Tesler would not have approved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler

peepee1982 3y ago
Nah. I don't think so. When it comes to modal workflows, there's a tradeoff to be made between intuitiveness and efficiency that comes with lots of practice. I don't use modal text editors anymore. But I get how modes can be useful and pleasant to have.
offices 3y ago
No modes means modifier keys for the most common actions which means Emacs pinky.

usrbinbash 3y ago

Kakoune has some good ideas, eg. piping commands into it and having the editor immediately execute them is a really good one. Reminiscent of acme for Plan9, which exposes virtual files for its buffers and to receive commands, which makes it really convenient to develop tools for it. That all being said, Kakoune simply doesn't offer enough for me to use it over vim. One of the first things I always see presented is multi-line-editing, a feature that could, maybe, come in handy once or twice a month for me. Comparing that to the simple fact that vim matured for over 30 years, and the sheer size of it's ecosystem, and switching to another modal terminal based editor is a really hard sell. The object-verb syntax is a not a selling point to me, because I can have the exact same "preview" effect by using a vim plugin like easymotion: d<leader><leader>w and I can see exactly to where it will delete before any changes happen to the buffer.

vbh21 3y ago

I feel using vim keybindings with VSCode to work best for me, for the work that I do. Having another modal command-line editor like vim just doesn't appeal to me. However, this is a good concept. Having this around over vim, with a well-established and mature ecosystem - is a hard sell.. Good luck.

throwaway71271 3y ago

There is a book from 1984, The Unix Programming Environment, by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike.(https://archive.org/details/UNIXProgrammingEnvironment https://archive.org/details/UNIXProgrammingEnvironment) It is pretty much how I use the computer today, with few improvements with emacs and tmux. As I am teaching my daughter how to use cat/cut/grep etc, I am doing so truly thinking that this is the best way to use a computer in 2023. The other day I was teaching her few shortcuts ^P and so on, I thought that maybe its time to re-think this whole cursor and keybinds thing. With apples vr magic goggles maybe someone can make an editor that I can follow code and write text and have 50 chats with some llm discussing various parts of the code I am working on. All editors are limited by monitor space, the linux kernel style guide still has 80 column recommendation (not a hard limit since 2020), the way we jump into and out of code, or we step into thing, all are very limited and are pretty much the same since 1984. I hope soon we have tooling like in the Hackers movie (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/) and use our eyes more to be able to follow code and systems. The complexity of the systems has increased (e.g. cloud, hundreds of services, even LSP, tons and tons of boilerplate and generated code), but our tools are stuck.