Kakoune vs Visual Studio Code

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Kakoune

19
36
+ 1
30
Visual Studio Code

174.4K
158.7K
+ 1
2.3K
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Kakoune vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

  1. Extension Eco-system: Visual Studio Code has a vast extension market with thousands of plugins available, catering to various development needs. Kakoune, on the other hand, has a more limited plugin ecosystem.

  2. Modal Editing: Kakoune is fundamentally based on modal editing, where one can perform various commands through different modes. Visual Studio Code is primarily focused on traditional editing methods, with support for modal editing through extensions like Vim.

  3. User Interface: Visual Studio Code provides a rich and customizable graphical user interface with features like IntelliSense, debugging tools, and themes. Kakoune, on the other hand, follows a minimalist approach with a terminal-based interface designed for efficient text editing.

  4. Cross-Platform Support: Visual Studio Code is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, making it a versatile choice for developers across different platforms. Kakoune, while primarily designed for UNIX systems, can also be used on other platforms with additional configurations.

  5. Scriptability: Kakoune emphasizes a powerful scripting language for customization and automation. Visual Studio Code offers robust scripting capabilities through extensions but may not provide the same level of flexibility as Kakoune's scripting language.

  6. Community Support: Visual Studio Code has a large and active community, leading to frequent updates, bug fixes, and community-driven extensions. Kakoune, while supported by a dedicated community, may not have the same level of developer engagement and collaboration as Visual Studio Code.

In Summary, Kakoune and Visual Studio Code differ in their extension ecosystem, editing models, user interfaces, platform support, scriptability, and community engagement.

Decisions about Kakoune and Visual Studio Code
Samriddhi Sinha
Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling · | 6 upvotes · 977.9K views

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 12 upvotes · 1.3M views

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

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Simon Ibssa
Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo · | 2 upvotes · 1.2M views

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

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Pros of Kakoune
Pros of Visual Studio Code
  • 7
    Multiple selections
  • 7
    Fast editing
  • 5
    Interactivity
  • 4
    Consistency of the underlying language
  • 4
    UNIX citizen
  • 3
    Self documented
  • 340
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 308
    Fast
  • 193
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
  • 126
    Git integration
  • 106
    Intellisense
  • 78
    Faster than Atom
  • 53
    Better ui, easy plugins, and nice git integration
  • 45
    Great Refactoring Tools
  • 44
    Good Plugins
  • 42
    Terminal
  • 38
    Superb markdown support
  • 36
    Open Source
  • 34
    Extensions
  • 26
    Large & up-to-date extension community
  • 26
    Awesome UI
  • 24
    Powerful and fast
  • 22
    Portable
  • 18
    Best editor
  • 18
    Best code editor
  • 17
    Easy to get started with
  • 15
    Lots of extensions
  • 15
    Built on Electron
  • 15
    Crossplatform
  • 15
    Good for begginers
  • 14
    Extensions for everything
  • 14
    Open, cross-platform, fast, monthly updates
  • 14
    All Languages Support
  • 13
    Easy to use and learn
  • 12
    Extensible
  • 12
    "fast, stable & easy to use"
  • 11
    Totally customizable
  • 11
    Git out of the box
  • 11
    Faster edit for slow computer
  • 11
    Ui design is great
  • 11
    Useful for begginer
  • 10
    Great community
  • 10
    SSH support
  • 10
    Fast Startup
  • 9
    It has terminal and there are lots of shortcuts in it
  • 9
    Powerful Debugger
  • 9
    Great language support
  • 9
    Works With Almost EveryThing You Need
  • 8
    Python extension is fast
  • 8
    Can compile and run .py files
  • 7
    Great document formater
  • 7
    Features rich
  • 6
    He is not Michael
  • 6
    Awesome multi cursor support
  • 6
    Extension Echosystem
  • 6
    She is not Rachel
  • 5
    Language server client
  • 5
    Easy azure
  • 5
    SFTP Workspace
  • 5
    VSCode.pro Course makes it easy to learn
  • 5
    Very proffesional
  • 4
    Supports lots of operating systems
  • 4
    Has better support and more extentions for debugging
  • 4
    Excellent as git difftool and mergetool
  • 4
    Virtualenv integration
  • 3
    Has more than enough languages for any developer
  • 3
    Better autocompletes than Atom
  • 3
    Emmet preinstalled
  • 3
    'batteries included'
  • 3
    More tools to integrate with vs
  • 2
    VS Code Server: Browser version of VS Code
  • 2
    Big extension marketplace
  • 2
    Customizable
  • 2
    Microsoft
  • 2
    Light
  • 2
    Fast and ruby is built right in
  • 2
    CMake support with autocomplete

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Cons of Kakoune
Cons of Visual Studio Code
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    • 46
      Slow startup
    • 29
      Resource hog at times
    • 20
      Poor refactoring
    • 13
      Poor UI Designer
    • 11
      Weak Ui design tools
    • 10
      Poor autocomplete
    • 8
      Super Slow
    • 8
      Huge cpu usage with few installed extension
    • 8
      Microsoft sends telemetry data
    • 7
      Poor in PHP
    • 6
      It's MicroSoft
    • 3
      Poor in Python
    • 3
      No Built in Browser Preview
    • 3
      No color Intergrator
    • 3
      Very basic for java development and buggy at times
    • 3
      No built in live Preview
    • 3
      Electron
    • 2
      Bad Plugin Architecture
    • 2
      Powered by Electron
    • 1
      Terminal does not identify path vars sometimes
    • 1
      Slow C++ Language Server

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    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.

    What is Visual Studio Code?

    Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

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    What companies use Kakoune?
    What companies use Visual Studio Code?
      No companies found
      See which teams inside your own company are using Kakoune or Visual Studio Code.
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      What tools integrate with Kakoune?
      What tools integrate with Visual Studio Code?
        No integrations found

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        What are some alternatives to Kakoune and Visual Studio Code?
        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.
        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.
        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.
        Micro
        Micro is a framework for cloud native development. Micro addresses the key requirements for building cloud native services. It leverages the microservices architecture pattern and provides a set of services which act as the building blocks
        JavaScript
        JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
        See all alternatives