So apparently there are two editors inspired by vim, but built from the ground up (as opposed to neovim, a vim fork that seeks to improve on top of vim).
I’ve heard of Helix several times prior, but it never quite attracted me. Seemed like vim, but different key bindings and much worse plugin system. It also has different visual and normal modes than vim, but it didn’t quite click with me. I do like it’s multi-cursor ability though.
Then it turns out that Helix was also inspired by not just vim, but also kakoune. Kakoune also has different keybindings, and different modes, but its different modes make sense to me. It fuses visual and normal mode into one. Your normal mode is for both navigation and selection.
Kakoune promotes the idea that you should visually see the text you’re operating on before running the command. You know how in vim, “dd” deletes a line, “dw” deletes a word, and “d$” deletes to the end of the line? In vim, you don’t see what you’re deleting before its gone (which is fine and works for many). In kakoune, the selection happens first before the action. So you select the word or the line, and then you delete.
But what I found to be Kakoune’s killer feature was its shell integration. Kakoune seemlessly integrates into the unix shell, allowing you to offload many tasks to it. For example, instead of it having a built-in sort command, you use the unix sort command to sort your lines.
I’m surprised kakoune isn’t more popular. Yes, it is still in a much earlier phase than vim, and the ecosystem is far less mature, but I am surprised to see Helix gaining more traction.
I’m still very new to kakoune and exploring it. But I like it a lot so far.
For those who have tried Kakoune, once you’ve included things like Treesitter and the clangd language server, which one feels faster, Kakoune or Neovim?
I’m still a Neovim main but one thing that I find interesting in Kakoune is their “client/server architecture” which apparently allows you to have one master Kakoune instance and multiple slave instances that would be in sync, kind of like how you can have multiple windows in any modern IDE (I’m not sure if Kakoune shares the clipboard with all of those instances?). That thing is still not available in Neovim (or Vim for that matter), which is a pain in multi-screen setups.
Long-ish time Kakoune user here.
I never felt the need to install something like Treesitter because I feel selection-based editing is already powerful enough, if that gives you an idea of how much faster I am with Kakoune compared to Neovim. Maybe I just don’t know everything Treesitter can do 🤔
It’s not a master/slave setup, it really is client/server, even the first instance of kakoune that you open will be a client that you can close without the other instances going down with it.
Yup, all shared: registers, buffers, marks, hooks. (You can choose not to share stuff between clients)
To complement your answer, usually people want tree-sitter not only for smart selections, but because of syntax highlighting.
Kakoune has the best of both worlds: https://github.com/kak-lsp/kak-lsp supports semantic highlights from LSP servers, but we also have projects like https://github.com/phaazon/kak-tree-sitter in case you want highlighting from tree-sitter.
Doesn’t “master/slave” = “client/server” in this context?
I haven’t tried this yet, so I can’t answer on Kakoune, but it was something that bothered me in neovim. I use a tiling window manager, and like having the editor tiles be managed by the tiling app. I’ll try that out sometime
I just tried it right now, you create a session when opening your file the first time
kak file.cpp -s name_of_your_session
, and then on the other windows you connect to that session withkak -c name_of_your_session
. It really works, they share the same buffer and copy-pasting works just fine.