Kakoune has some good ideas, eg. piping commands into it and having the editor immediately execute them is a really good one. Reminiscent of acme for Plan9, which exposes virtual files for its buffers and to receive commands, which makes it really convenient to develop tools for it.
That all being said, Kakoune simply doesn't offer enough for me to use it over vim. One of the first things I always see presented is multi-line-editing, a feature that could, maybe, come in handy once or twice a month for me. Comparing that to the simple fact that vim matured for over 30 years, and the sheer size of it's ecosystem, and switching to another modal terminal based editor is a really hard sell.
The object-verb syntax is a not a selling point to me, because I can have the exact same "preview" effect by using a vim plugin like easymotion:
d<leader><leader>w
and I can see exactly to where it will delete before any changes happen to the buffer.
That all being said, Kakoune simply doesn't offer enough for me to use it over vim. One of the first things I always see presented is multi-line-editing, a feature that could, maybe, come in handy once or twice a month for me. Comparing that to the simple fact that vim matured for over 30 years, and the sheer size of it's ecosystem, and switching to another modal terminal based editor is a really hard sell.
The object-verb syntax is a not a selling point to me, because I can have the exact same "preview" effect by using a vim plugin like easymotion:
and I can see exactly to where it will delete before any changes happen to the buffer.