Kakoune vs Textadept

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.

Both text and GUI versions behave mostly the same, just the way notepad users would expect it to.
Like shift+arrows - select, Ctrl+c - copy, Ctrl+o - open a file.

It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

You can write plugins pretty easily.

Here is the API doc, quite compact.

Here is a module which adds a support for ctags.

Has very few dependencies, and very small footprint. Can be copied to a new system in a moment, unpacked and be at your service.

Has a built-in lua engine.