I haven't used Kakoune, but I've used emacs, Neovim, and Helix. I love the simplicity of Helix and how easy it is to get it up and running with language servers

I haven't used Kakoune, but I've used emacs, Neovim, and Helix. I love the simplicity of Helix and how easy it is to get it up and running with language servers. Emacs and Neovim have amazing ecosystems, but I'm not willing to devote the time needed to keep my setup working and do the labor of installing and configuring so many plugins. I actually switched from emacs to a mix of VSCode and JetBrains IDEs (PyCharm, DataGrip) but I sometimes find myself copy-pasting blocks of text into emacs when I need to do anything fancy or repetitive. I used a Neovim integration for VSCode for a while but found it annoyingly buggy. IDEs like VSCode and JetBrains seem to be in denial about coding being a text editing activity. Emacs and Neovim want you to take on a part-time job building and maintaining your own personal editor application out of a pile of spare parts. Helix to me is a very promising approach: a text editor that aspires to provide enough polished core features to be a productive coding environment.