Notepad++ vs Kakoune

Notepad++ has built-in support for syntax highlighting for a wide selection of programming languages.

Notepad++ is a very light program that starts almost instantly. This makes it a great text editor for users that want something that will start the second they open it.

A list of hundreds of plugins is maintained.

You can get a portable version of N++ and put it on a flash drive or your dropbox account and have your editor, configured the way you like, at any computer that you are on.

Notepad++ is licensed under GPL, which means it is free/open source software that you can use freely.

In Notepad++, the user can utilise regular expressions to quickly modify text across multiple files.

If you close Notepad++ (npp), your documents remain even if you haven't saved.

You can define your own custom syntax highlighting rules (or add support for others) .

Very easy to use and personalize.

While it is disabled by default, when enabled, it is possible to edit more than one line at a time. This is helpful in many situations.

The user can open and edit files in multiple screens within the editor window.

If you have the Plugin Manager installed you can search for MarkdownViewer++ and install it via that plugin.

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.

It follows the UNIX philosophy by doing one thing well (text editing) and interfaces nicely with other CLI tools.

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.

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.

A helper pops up when typing commands.

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.