Kakoune, the Text Editor I Didn’t Know I Needed

Like the idea of Emacs and Vim but think it is too complicated?

If you are a software developer, you may have tried Emacs and Vim at some point in your life. If you are like me and kind of have a goldfish memory for complicated keyboard combinations, you would have given up on these editors already deciding they are too much work to learn.

I’ve learned the basics of Vim but never got efficient at using it. Instead my goto editor ended up being TextMate on the Mac. It tried to take idea of these two old Unix editor and bring them into the modern era.

So far so good, but I have lately found myself having to ssh into a Linux box. That is when you realize that a text editor working well in a terminal would be really handy.

I am willing to sacrifice some power for better ease of use. Kakoune maybe just that kind of editor. It is a sort of Vim replacement. It has made a number of design changes relative to Vim that makes it much easier to become productive for people who don’t want to spend lots of time learning Vim.

What I like about Kakoune

Vim has this powerful idea of combining actions. E.g. I can can hit w to move a word or 3w to move 3 words. I can prepend an action such as delete d to combine actions, so d3w, deletes 3 words.

Kakoune has taken this same concept and reversed it. So you write 3wd instead. That is you…