When comparing GCC vs Kakoune, the Slant community recommends Kakoune for most people. In the question“What are the best text editors for UNIX-like systems?” Kakoune is ranked 9th while GCC is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Kakoune is:
Kakoune first started as a rewrite from scratch of vim, but then ended up being another text editor altogether. So it's inspired in a lot of ways from vim.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Mature
GCC was first released in 1987 when it was called the GNU C Compiler, a couple of months after it was released it was extended to support C++ too. Nowadays it supports other languages than C or C++.
Having been in use and constant development for more than 20 years it has reached a state of maturity and stability. The fact that it's so old also means that there are countless resources out there for people who want to use it.
Pro Default on many systems
GCC is the default compiler on several systems. Most of the time people have it installed on their machine without even knowing it's there.
Pro Available for even the most obscure hardware
Since it's so old and very popular it has been ported to almost any architecture imaginable. This means that it's probably compatible with even the most obscure and unheard hardware.
Pro Very stable, excellent cross-platform use
Pro Will be familiar to vim users
Kakoune first started as a rewrite from scratch of vim, but then ended up being another text editor altogether. So it's inspired in a lot of ways from vim.
Pro More modern than vim
Pro Good UNIX citizen
It follows the UNIX philosophy by doing one thing well (text editing) and interfaces nicely with other CLI tools.
Pro Text selection mechanism
Kakoune works on selections, which are oriented, inclusive range of characters, selections have an anchor and a cursor character. Most commands move both of them, except when extending selection where the anchor character stays fixed and the cursor one moves around.
Pro Very expressive
Kakoune provides a very expressive set of commands, including various objects selection (paragraph, blocks, words), alignment support, conditional selection filtering...
This set of command is expressive enough to implement all the provided auto indentation logic.
Pro Actively developed and supported
Pro Self-documenting
A helper pops up when typing commands.
Pro Simpler and more consistent than Vim
Some keys select, other keys operate on the selections. Shift
is used to extend the selection, alt
is used for alternative behavior, e.g. reverse the search direction. No inconsistencies like Y
which means yy
and not y$
in Vim.
Cons
Con Small community
Con No real Windows support
Will compile under CygWin.