I switched to kakoune from vim in early 2020, and I really like it (previously: emacs 1994-2004, vim 2004-2020). It's worth prefacing what follows by saying that I heavily relied on the visual selection features in vim.
kakoune provides a limited orthogonal toolset that composes extremely well. After a week using kakoune I felt at least as confident with its command language as I did with vim's after years of use. Aside from a few vim plugins that were super helpful, I didn't miss anything after transitioning, except for the 'R' command (and to a lesser extent proper integration between the 'r' and '.' commands).
I worried that kakoune's multiple selection paradigm wouldn't scale well, that it wouldn't be routinely useful, etc. On the contrary, I use multiple selections heavily, often as a more ergonomic alternative to recorded macros, constantly for rectangle-based operations (whether multi-line editing, indenting, ASCII art creation, whatever).
Oh, for you tmux lovers out there, kakoune integrates amazingly well. All of its multi-window functionality directly uses tmux panes, with a server application (think emacs-server) tying everything together.
In terms of ecosystem, vim is much richer. But kakoune is a practical, beautifully designed tool.
Could you comment specifically on this part of the comment you replied to?
> Kakoune actively makes it harder to do the normal thing people do in a text editor: jump around a file and make specific edits to individual lines. Instead, a bunch of normal movement commands (such as forward and backward search) leave extra cursors in your wake, forcing you to press an extra key to dismiss them otherwise you'll get erroneous edits
Do you find that's the case? If so, how do you deal with it? Just remember to dismiss the extra cursors?
It's quite common for the selection created by motion to have immediate subsequent use. I do use the ';' or ' ' commands to clear the selection or end multi-selection, but typically only once per major operation. On top of that, it is common to start some new editing sequence which automatically resets or extends the selection in a natural way.
Multiple selection has surprised me in its usefulness. It took a bit to get used to multi-step operations (select, then move/expand/match, then modify, etc.), but the beauty of this is that it's possible to incrementally undo these steps, unlike having to get the whole thing right in one go in vim. I find myself using regex captures in multiple selection -- another example of how I confidently use basic kakoune functionality where I used to rely on recorded macros in vim.
I'm really happy to hear that kakoune works for me. Perhaps I just don't understand it. Or perhaps I'm reliant on a different subset of vim's features than you were and my chosen subset doesn't map as well onto kakoune.
Most of what I do in vim is now so heavily ingrained in muscle memory that I just don't think, I see the text change to what I want it to be. Perhaps that's too hard of a habit to break for me.
kakoune provides a limited orthogonal toolset that composes extremely well. After a week using kakoune I felt at least as confident with its command language as I did with vim's after years of use. Aside from a few vim plugins that were super helpful, I didn't miss anything after transitioning, except for the 'R' command (and to a lesser extent proper integration between the 'r' and '.' commands).
I worried that kakoune's multiple selection paradigm wouldn't scale well, that it wouldn't be routinely useful, etc. On the contrary, I use multiple selections heavily, often as a more ergonomic alternative to recorded macros, constantly for rectangle-based operations (whether multi-line editing, indenting, ASCII art creation, whatever).
Oh, for you tmux lovers out there, kakoune integrates amazingly well. All of its multi-window functionality directly uses tmux panes, with a server application (think emacs-server) tying everything together.
In terms of ecosystem, vim is much richer. But kakoune is a practical, beautifully designed tool.