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Add to SafariWhen comparing Kakoune vs Femto Emacs, the Slant community recommends Kakoune for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source text editors for programming?” Kakoune is ranked 11th while Femto Emacs is ranked 37th. 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
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 Well documented
A long and well written tutorial teaches how to program in femtolisp and write extensions for Femto Emacs.
Pro Highly compatible with Emacs
If you know Emacs, you can start using Femto Emacs immediately.
Pro Very small footprint
The size of the executable file and the femtolisp library add up to only 500 k. The C source code is also small and well documented, so one can easily modify it. You can also use the source code to learn how to program a text editor.
Pro Very fast startup time
For small files, Femto Emacs starts up faster than emacs or vim.
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 syntax coloring for Latex
The distribution comes with syntax coloring examples for many languages, like Haskell, C, Lisp, Python, etc. However, there is no scheme for Latex. If you need syntax coloring for Latex, you will need to add your own color scheme.
Con Source distribution only
Femto Emacs is distributed only in source form. Therefore, you need to install ncurses, gcc and compile it with make and make install. There is no binary distribution. If you want mouse support, you need to program it in femtolisp or in C. This should not be a problem if you are a programmer, but can become an issue if you don't know Lisp or C. If you want to use femtolisp on Windows, you will need mingw and ncurses.
