Hello and welcome to this new community for talking about Kakoune !
I am by no means an expert on kakoune, but I love using it. I created this community, exactly because I am not an expert, and I wanted some place to learn more and talk to other people who like kakoune :))
If you want to ask a question about kakoune, share your kakrc, your favourite plugins or your workflow using kakoune - please do so here :))
If you’re not (yet 😉) using kakoune, you’re also welcome to participate and ask questions :))
I have a question about kakoune:
What is kakoune and why should I care :)
that is a good question :))
First I just want to say, my intent is not to convert people to using kakoune, perhaps I should have been more clear about that in my posts. My thought with posting in vim and nvim communities is that people already using kakoune might be in those communities, since the text editors are so alike.
with that said, kakoune is a modal text editor running in the terminal. It is inspired by vim, but for me, 3 key points where it defers are
selection -> action. Kakuone is based around selections and you always select the text you want to manipulate before manipulating it. In vim, if you want to delete two words, you type d2w. In Kakuone, you type 2Wd. For me, this makes the experience of editing text much more interactive, and if I need to select more complicated text, than just the next 2 words, seeing what text I’ve selected before applying the action, makes it much quicker to readjust the selection, rather than undoing and trying the action again.
Piping. I really like piping. In both vim and kakoune, if you want to pipe some text, you have to select it first. I just find selecting text in kakoune much more enjoyable, because it’s built around selection.
Discoverability. Kakoune has a built in clippy guide, which, if turned on, comes with completion suggestions for what you’re writing, as well as the manual pages for those commands. This has made me discover a lot of commands that I otherwise would have either never found or found through external sources, like reading a blog post. This has boosted my use of plugins and built-in functions, since I now know, what I have at my disposal.
This is just why I like kakoune, and I don’t expect people to change just because of that. But if you’re already using a modal text editor, like vim, you might be interested in also following this community, to see what happens here. I follow communities for vim and nvim, because I like to see what happens there. Someone might write a nice plugin, that I’ll get inspired by, or have a nice workflow or something third. We have a lot in common, and I like to hear, what people are working on and how they’re working :))