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Emacs

1.3K
1.2K
+ 1
322
Kakoune

19
36
+ 1
30
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Emacs vs Kakoune: What are the differences?

Emacs: The extensible self-documenting text editor. GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing; Kakoune: Vim inspired — Faster as in less keystrokes — Multiple selections — Orthogonal design. Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode..

Emacs and Kakoune belong to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Emacs are:

  • Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.
  • Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
  • Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.

On the other hand, Kakoune provides the following key features:

  • Multiple selections as a central way of interacting
  • Powerful selection manipulation primitives
  • Powerful text manipulation primitives

"Vast array of extensions" is the primary reason why developers consider Emacs over the competitors, whereas "Fast editing" was stated as the key factor in picking Kakoune.

Kakoune is an open source tool with 4.85K GitHub stars and 354 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Kakoune's open source repository on GitHub.

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Pros of Emacs
Pros of Kakoune
  • 65
    Vast array of extensions
  • 44
    Have all you can imagine
  • 40
    Everything i need in one place
  • 39
    Portability
  • 32
    Customer config
  • 16
    Your config works on any platform
  • 13
    Low memory consumption
  • 11
    Perfect for monsters
  • 10
    All life inside one program
  • 8
    Extendable, portable, fast - all at your fingertips
  • 6
    Enables extremely rapid keyboard-only navigation
  • 5
    Widely-used keybindings (e.g. by bash)
  • 5
    Extensible in Lisp
  • 5
    Runs everywhere important
  • 4
    FOSS Software
  • 4
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 4
    Git integration
  • 4
    May be old but always reliable
  • 3
    Asynchronous
  • 3
    Powerful UI
  • 1
    Huge ecosystem
  • 7
    Multiple selections
  • 7
    Fast editing
  • 5
    Interactivity
  • 4
    Consistency of the underlying language
  • 4
    UNIX citizen
  • 3
    Self documented

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Cons of Emacs
Cons of Kakoune
  • 4
    So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked
  • 4
    Hard to learn for beginners
  • 1
    Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux
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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Emacs?

    GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

    What is Kakoune?

    Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones. Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode.

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    What companies use Emacs?
    What companies use Kakoune?
      No companies found
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      What tools integrate with Emacs?
      What tools integrate with Kakoune?
        No integrations found

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        What are some alternatives to Emacs and Kakoune?
        Atom
        At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.
        Eclipse
        Standard Eclipse package suited for Java and plug-in development plus adding new plugins; already includes Git, Marketplace Client, source code and developer documentation. Click here to file a bug against Eclipse Platform.
        Vim
        Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.
        Spacemacs
        Since version 0.101.0 and later Spacemacs totally abolishes the frontiers between Vim and Emacs. The user can now choose his/her preferred editing style and enjoy all the Spacemacs features. Even better, it is possible to dynamically switch between the two styles seamlessly which makes it possible for programmers with different styles to do seat pair programming using the same editor.
        Neovim
        Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.
        See all alternatives