One of the things I enjoy the most about working in Kakoune, is how seamlessly it integrate with command-line tools.

This is a list of the command-line tools I use, when writing in Kakoune. You are very much encouraged to share the tools you use, in the comment section :)

I study computer science and I use Kakoune both for writing code and for writing solutions to math-questions. These tools are what helps me in my use-cases :)

Yesterday, while writing in Haskell, I selected all of my document and piped it through “grep ::” to quickly get a list of all functions I had defined.

I also often use wc -c and wc -l to count how many characters or lines a text segment takes up. I do this by selecting the text and piping it into the respective command. This replaces all the text by the answer. I then undo, to have my text back.

A few times, I’ve also piped into sort, to quickly sort some lines of text.

I’ve also written a few small CLI tools myself, that I use on a regular basis.

A small calculator, that I use for solving trivial math problems. (It only works with integers and basic operators at the moment). I’ve written this myself, because it keeps the original equation when writing it’s output, rather than replacing my equation with the solution

A small program for repeating a string. I use this for writing trailing zeroes or other patterns. It is very fast to highlight the text you want to repeat and pipe it into this program.

I’ve written many other small cli tools for specific use cases, and Kakoune just makes it so easy and fast to write and use tools.

For most purposes, you don’t have to use Kakoune-script, you just write whatever program you want that operates on text and you’re golden. This is the beauty of the unix philosophy :)

To conclude:

Most of the tools I use, I have written myself, but I use ‘grep’, ‘sort’ and ‘wc’ too.