When comparing Syntaxic vs Kakoune, the Slant community recommends Kakoune for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source text editors for programming?” Kakoune is ranked 11th while Syntaxic is ranked 38th. 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 Cross-platform
Syntaxic is available on Windows, OSX, and Linux.
Pro Built-in Shell
Syntaxic has a built-in terminal emulator.
Pro Code completion
Syntaxic offers symbol completion.
Pro SSH editing
Syntaxic permits editing files through SSH and it also supports features such as sudo
, su
, and tunneling.
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 Lacks file preview
There's no file preview in Syntaxic when selecting a file in the file tree.
Con Can't load binary files
An error results when you try to load a binary file in Syntaxic.
Con Can't switch syntax highlighting on the fly
Con Non-intuitive controls.
For example, you can only move tabs inside of group, not to other groups, or to a new window by dragging and dropping.
Con Not free
Syntaxic needs a license code to work which costs $20 until version 1.0 hits, and once it does it will be $35.
Con Small community
Con No real Windows support
Will compile under CygWin.