When comparing Kakoune vs Suplemon, the Slant community recommends Kakoune for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Kakoune is ranked 11th while Suplemon is ranked 51st. 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 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.
Pro Native multi cursor editing on the command line
Multiple cursors & column selection allow versatile ways of editing.
Pro Low learning curve
Does not drown you in keyboard shortcuts or non-intuitive use-concepts as you start using it, but high-level functionality can still be easily accessed when the need for it arises.
Pro Mouse support
Scroll wheel works automatically. With mouse mode (F8) the cursor can be moved with a left-click to a desired position, and new cursors can be added with right clicks.
Pro No required dependencies
Pro Shows linting messages for Python code (requires flake8)
Cons
Con Small community
Con No real Windows support
Will compile under CygWin.
Con Default bindings do not play nice with OS X (Alt+???)
Con Written in C++
Con No region selection
Some selection features that are taken for granted in other editors are missing here. As they say in their documentation, if you want to copy and paste part of a line, you need to use the mouse to select it and copy with Ctrl + Shift + C.