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Add to SafariWhen comparing Kakoune vs Ninja, the Slant community recommends Ninja for most people. In the question“What are the best Python IDEs or editors?” Ninja is ranked 24th while Kakoune is ranked 28th. The most important reason people chose Ninja is:
Once dependencies like maven are installed it is up and running in minutes with one simple command.
Specs
Question 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 Simple set up
Once dependencies like maven are installed it is up and running in minutes with one simple command.
Pro Easy horizontal scaling
Ninja is stateless by design. This makes horizontal scaling very easy and just a matter of adding servers.
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 Little user choice in organization
Since most of the code and folder structure are automatically generated, this leaves little room to the developer on how they will organize their project.
