When comparing Kakoune vs Eclipse with PyDev, the Slant community recommends Eclipse with PyDev for most people. In the question“What are the best Python IDEs or editors?” Eclipse with PyDev is ranked 22nd while Kakoune is ranked 28th. The most important reason people chose Eclipse with PyDev is:
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
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 Can be extended to have additional features through plugins
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Pro Feature rich including Django integration
Django Integration, Auto code completion, Multi language support, Integrated Python Debugging, code analysis, code templates ,smart indent, bracket matching, error markup, source control integration, code folding, UML Editing and viewing, and unit test integration.
Pro Good integration of interactive python console even in debugging mode
Pro Handles non-Python components well
If your project includes non-Python pieces (ie. Javascript, CSS, UML, etc) Eclipse tends to provide much better support for these than IDEs focused exclusively on Python.
Pro Can use different environments for different projects
It's very handy for managing multiple projects that each use their own virtualenv or conda environment, you can assign a different interpreter to each project and they will handle things like code completion correctly.
Pro Good font rendering
Because Eclipse is based on SWT, it uses the native font rendering and thus looks better than other IDEs on some Linux systems, where the Java font rendering is not optimal.
Pro One of the few that can debug Jython code
It handles both Jython and CPython.
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 Just plugin for python, not full editor
It useful only if you use python as additional(secondary) language in your project on Eclipse
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.