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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.
Pros of Emacs
- Vast array of extensions65
- Have all you can imagine44
- Everything i need in one place40
- Portability39
- Customer config32
- Your config works on any platform16
- Low memory consumption13
- Perfect for monsters11
- All life inside one program10
- Extendable, portable, fast - all at your fingertips8
- Enables extremely rapid keyboard-only navigation6
- Widely-used keybindings (e.g. by bash)5
- Extensible in Lisp5
- Runs everywhere important5
- FOSS Software4
- Powerful multilanguage IDE4
- Git integration4
- May be old but always reliable4
- Asynchronous3
- Powerful UI3
- Huge ecosystem1
Pros of Kakoune
- Multiple selections7
- Fast editing7
- Interactivity5
- Consistency of the underlying language4
- UNIX citizen4
- Self documented3
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Cons of Emacs
- So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked4
- Hard to learn for beginners4
- Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux1