Kakoune vs Kate

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.

Has a terminal that can sync to the location of your document, letting you compile or run your program quickly or run quick commands, all without leaving the editor.

Kate allows you to make projects to simplify the organisation of your code. This brings in additional organization of an IDE without the overhead.

Kate is pretty fast and lightweight. This helps it with it's start up speed.

Kate supports syntax highlighting for over 180 languages, from Assembler to Zsh.

Kate uses KDE's input and output libraries to read and write files, allowing seamless integration with FTP, SMB, SFTP, and many other protocols.

Lots of plugins allow Kate to expand or shrink based on your needs. It includes GDB integration, XML completion, and symbol viewing to speed up programming.

Notepads alternative (for the Windows users).

Kate has a vi entry mode.