When comparing pyvim 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 pyvim is ranked 67th. 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 Fast development of new features
Pyvim is written in Python. It's a great language that allows for fast development of features and quick bugfixing.
It also relies on existing Python plugins to add even more functionality.
Pro Vim-like editor
Pyvim has some of Vim's features and shortcuts, as well as some custom improvements that are already built-in.
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 CLI only
Pyvim runs through the terminal only.
Con Small community
Con No real Windows support
Will compile under CygWin.