Howl vs Kakoune

You don't need the mouse to use Howl. Everything can be accomplished with commands and shortcuts.

It's extremely lightweight, making it start up pretty quickly.

Howl is very intuitive and easy to use.

Plugins (bundles) can be written in Lua or MoonScript.

Non distracted icons, toolbars, pannels, extra spacing, etc.

Has built-in functionality for completion, inline documentation and linting so IDE-like features can be added easily.

Search for your commands in an easy way and see in the list which key-strokes are mapped to which commands

Howl is an open source project and is actively developed on GitHub(howl-editor/howl). It has a MIT license.

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.