Add to ChromeWhen comparing Komodo Edit vs Kakoune, the Slant community recommends Kakoune for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Kakoune is ranked 11th while Komodo Edit is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose Kakoune is:
It follows the UNIX philosophy by doing one thing well (text editing) and interfaces nicely with other CLI tools.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Has built-in FTP
Komodo Edit has a built-in FTP client which allows developers to access remotely hosted files.
Pro Free and open-source
Komodo Edit is the free and open-source counterpart of Komodo IDE.
Pro Vim support
Komodo Edit has support for a limited Vim mode.
Pro Good UNIX citizen
It follows the UNIX philosophy by doing one thing well (text editing) and interfaces nicely with other CLI tools.
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 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 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.
Pro Self-documenting
A helper pops up when typing commands.
Cons
Con Not very lightweight
Komodo Edit is not very lightweight and that can slow it down during startup.
Con Adds project files to project code
Con Small community
Con Default bindings do not play nice with OS X (Alt+???)
Con No real Windows support
Will compile under CygWin.
Con Written in C++
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