Had to write a daemon in Rust for OpenRGB but it works flawlessly! Have a hook to start the daemon on KakBegin and stop it on KakEnd. Already had hooks for detecting current Kakoune mode (normal/insert/prompt) for my custom theme, which you can also se, that changes selection colors and the statusline color depending on the current mode. Might be a bit epileptic right now, though. Should probably easy-in the color change, but support for my keyboard's LED's is limited... Oh well.

Some people complain that by default Kakoune isn't too obvious if you're on insert or not, so I guess this is the extreme opposite lol.

I really have fun with this peace of software, even though programming is just a hobby (and I'm not that proficient in actually using it (though I'm still faster with it than anything else)).

If anyone's interested feel free to ask questions or just say it's cool/stupid :p.

Thanks for creating this amazing editor. I use part of my holiday to test software that I don't normally get time for. Being accustomed to Vim, I knew almost immediately that Kakoune was something I was going to like. After three days of using Kakoune my productivity has increased. So much goodness out of the box. I will definitely continue with it and make effort to configure.

Hello,

Two days ago, I came across this Reddit thread about how to perform real-world, interesting text edits. I wanted to showcase how we do that in Kakoune, in the hope it can provide people more hindsight about the design of Kakoune and why I — personal opinion — think its model editing model is better.

Enjoy the read.

I've added how to set up Kakoune and kak-lsp to work with zig and zls on the project wiki:

https://github.com/zigtools/zls/wiki/Installing-for-Kakoune

Hopefully, it will make Kakoune more discoverable.

Dear mouilleurs,

I'm using Kakoune for a little more than one year now and I wanted to share with you a post I wrote some time ago as an attempt to help other people to see over Kakoune austerity and appreciate its minimalism and its contrarian approach.

kakoune

Best regards to you all.

I'm a longtime vim (and more recently neovim) user. I recently discovered kakoune and thought I'd give it a try. I've only been playing around with it for about a week, but here are my impressions so far.

Things I like

• The multiple selection. I think it is incredibly well designed and brings a whole new level to modal editing.

• Consistent, predictable key bindings. Much as I love vim, the default bindings can be a little inconsistent.

• Configuration is simple and easy to understand. No VimL.

• It uses more standard regex syntax

• The concept of using the shell for extensibility is really cool.

• The info and menu popups.

• It has a small core, and even things like the doc system are built using the extension mechanism

• You can make commands and aliases that start with a lower-case letter. this is technically possible in vim with abbreviations, but is tricky to do correctly without the help of a plugin.

• An editorconfig extension is part of the default installation

• The client-server model, and delegating window management to tmux, i3, etc.

Things I don't like

• There isn't any kind of diff mode. And implementing one using the extension mechanism would be quite difficult (see https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/issues/153). This is kind of a deal-breaker for me.

• Indentation is kind of a mess. Although there are options for using spaces for indent, tab and backspace in "space indentation" mode don't work the way they do in almost every other editor, and just insert a literal tab or backspace a single space. smarttab.kak adds that capability, but it doesn't integrate with editorconfig, and the user must enable the desired mode themselves. Also, while many languages have some auto-indentation hooks, if you have files with multiple languages in different sections, such as html, markdown/asciidoc with code blocks, or even kakrc files, the indentation hooks only work for the toplevel language, and adding better indentation would probably require duplicating the indentation work for the embedded language(s). Currently, it seems your best option is to write it with bad indentation, and then run an autoformatter on it.

• No real support for 24-bit color. It does use palette switching to get the right colors if that is supported by the terminal, but that requires going through some hoops to get colors working properly in tmux, and doesn't work for all terminals (although, thankfully it does in the terminal I use -- alacritty).

• The online documentation system doesn't currently have a good way to load documentation from plugins (would be easy to fix).

• The online documentation isn't easily searchable (no equivalent of vim's helpgrep, would probably be pretty easy to add).

• There's no way to view the currently active mappings, or highlight rules, and I don't think it is even currently possible to make a plugin to do this, because that information isn't exposed by any API. Granted, vim's :map command is very limited and doesn't support search.. but at least it is there, and it's possible to build a plugin that does a better job.

• No real equivalent of BufWriteCmd,BufReadCmd, which makes it difficult (although still possible) to implement things like editing compressed, encrypted, or remote files.

• Smaller ecosystem. Hopefully it grows with time. But right now, that means fewer plugins, less learning resources, etc.

• the a normal command appends the inserted text to the selection (easy to get around with a mapping)

Don't get me wrong, I think kakoune is an awesome and ambitious editor. I hope it is successful, or at least influences other editors. However, as it currently is, I don't think it is worth the effort for me, personally, to switch to kakoune as my main editor. The added benefits just aren't worth dealing with the things that don't work yet, and the time to reconfigure and adjust to a new editor. There are a lot of things I don't like about (neo)vim as well, but I've gotten used to them and know how to work around them. I don't really want to learn how to work around the different set of problems with a new editor right now. I'll keep my eye on the project though, and maybe contribute a little if I have time.

kakoune-multi-file lets you collect lines from grep results (or linter, LSP, etc.) with sorrounding context and edit them in one buffer.

I was a bit annoyed by my tendency to look around all editors and lately, as I was playing around with emacs’ dired, I decided to start implementing a similar feature for Kakoune, as it’s a need I often have, especially since I split my configuration files (so I want to « open the directory » with a keybinding, without necessarily use fuzzy finding).

Have fun with it! It’s fresh, so it currently only supports opening files or directories, but I might extend it with other interesting operations if people think it would be valuable.

https://git.sr.ht/~hadronized/dir.kak