from Hacker News

Kakoune – An experiment for a better code editor

by Somasis on 10/31/15, 11:19 PM with 34 comments

• by Direct on 11/1/15, 3:09 AM

  I tried switching to this editor permanently from vim. The selection based movements are asurdly good, I could kill for something like this in vim.

  However I couldn't stick with it for two reasons. The first is when I went to figure out how to customise it, I found that the customisation is essentially vim like but weaker. Everything is hardcoded like it would be in vim but with less options. If you're used to Emacs insane customization, this is the other end of the spectrum. The stuff that IS customisable works by executing embedded bash scripts[1]!? You can only embed these in specific hooks and places, so it's really limited, and platform specific. Install this on a system missing a bash feature someone is using and who knows how it'll behave.

  Basically, the features implemented are gorgeous, but past that I can't stick with it. Just going to consider trying to port the selection based movements to a vim plugin but I think it'll be a challenge.

  1: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/blob/master/rc/clang.kak

• by pkkp on 11/1/15, 1:08 AM

  You'll want to take a look at your site's theme on mobile devices. On my iPhone 6 on iOS 9 (Safari), the navigation bar is fixed at the top half of the pane and takes up over half the screen.

• by chc4 on 11/1/15, 2:56 AM

  I've played with Kakoune a little bit not that long ago. It's actually pretty nice. By far the best feature is the popup that lists all the sub-actions for chords: imagine if, when you press "g" in Vim, it lists all keys you press after AND what they do. It makes it very easy to figure out new behavior. The idea of working on selections is also very intuitive and works well, both in vim compatability and ease of use.

  The biggest issue I had with it, that made me return to Vim instead of try and keep with Kakoune, are the lack of options. A lot of the settings appear to be hardcoded, with no way to set them even with : commands. While it does have scripting support, and a lot of the core application is implemented with it, there doesn't seem to be any docs on how it works or any community behind it.

• by cpfohl on 11/1/15, 1:20 AM

  I can't even say how happy it made me that Clippy made it into a CLI program. Is that a common joke I've just missed elsewhere?

• by h2077545 on 11/1/15, 1:19 PM

  Kakoune seems great and I hope I will eventually make the switch from vim but there are currently 3 things holding me back.

  1. Slime-like interaction: In vim I'm used to [vim-slime](https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime) for interactive languages such as python but I couldn't yet find an equivalent way to do it in kakoune. I suspect there is an easy way to do something like this using `:new` or the tmux integration but I don't know how.

  2. Executing commands in the underlying shell: With C/C++ I usually need to work only with a single file and a fast compile-run cycle. I have simple functions defined for compile and run in my vimrc so that I can do it with a simple key map but I'm not sure how to do this in kakoune. The problem is sometimes output of my program exceeds one line so `:echo` is not quite useful here.

  3. ctags/cscope integration: I haven't really checked this yet but I need something for jumping around in large codebases.

• by mercurial on 11/1/15, 7:53 AM

  It looks nice, and I assume the underlying code is less gnarly than vim's, but I don't see the radical improvement over vim which would make me switch (also, obviously, it's not going to benefit from the huge ecosystem of vim plugins).

  What I think would be a killer for a vim successor would be to keep the best-in-class editor functionality, add decent extensibility (not vimscript) in the core product. Then add support for stuff commonly found in IDEs: notion of projects/subprojects, API to support plugging syntax parsers easily, source control integration, etc., and offer core plugins for a few popular languages.

• by openfuture on 11/1/15, 3:34 AM

  I'm hoping neovim will be able to adapt these ideas in the future.

  They're addressing all the hardcoded parts so it should be possible to make any of these with an addon / some nvimrc magic.

• by GhotiFish on 11/1/15, 11:45 PM

  First impressions with this editor are very good.

  One thing I'm not 100% sure how to do is substituions with references

  so if I want to change the all the strings "foo(5, bar)" to "baz(bar).foo(5)"

  with 5 and bar being arbitrary strings. How could I do that? In vim I would use a regex expression and refer to matching sections with "%s/foo(\([^,]+\), \([^)]+\))/baz(\2).foo(\1)/gc". In Kakoune it seems I might have to do some multiselect shenanigans, the regex has better escaping for my taste, but I can't match on specific selections. So I can't shuffle them arbitrarily.

  I looked through the vim golf challenges and couldn't find Kakoune doing an operation like this.

  mawww, do you have some screencasts of you using this editor? I would be nice to have some live demonstrations showing off useful and common usage patterns for it.

• by quanticle on 11/1/15, 9:57 PM

  One piece of feedback about the website itself: the actual reading area is unusably small when viewed on a mobile device. Here's a screenshot:http://imgur.com/yvOGc02. Note that the menu doesn't hide, so >50% of the screen is occupied by a static menu that's irrelevant to the actual content I'm trying to read.

• by eccstartup on 11/1/15, 3:22 AM

  Documentation in PDF available?