Brackets vs Kakoune

Brackets will automatically refresh the browser and load the latest saved version of a file open in the browser. This works with php as well. Editing a css will even highlight the tag that's currently being worked on. However, it only works with Chrome.

Brackets is easy on memory usage and it starts up quickly.

Brackets is entirely free and open source.

The functionality of Brackets can be extended via a simple-to-use extension manager. The extension manager also has a considerable number of extensions and themes.

A feature called "Quick Edit" allows the user to select a tag in (a html file, for example) and edit the associated style without switching over to the css document. It also supports SASS and LESS pre-processors.

Brackets is being actively maintained and developed.

Hovering over colors hex codes or image paths will pop up previews of corresponding colors and images.

Brackets supports drag and drop of text, as well as multi / rectangular selection.

The editor is built using html, css, and javascript, making it extendable by any front-end developer.

You can have your cursor independently on multiple lines and so creating templates and/or editing multiple things at once is really fast and easy.

Vim-style editing is already built in the text editor.

A default extension allows for the extraction of PSD resources, such as images and styles. There's good integration for placing extracted resources into source.

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.