When comparing Kakoune vs CudaText, the Slant community recommends CudaText for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” CudaText is ranked 10th while Kakoune is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose CudaText is:
About ~180 programming languages supported at the time of writing either built-in or can be added easily with the addon manager.
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 Many programming languages supported for syntax highlighting
About ~180 programming languages supported at the time of writing either built-in or can be added easily with the addon manager.
Pro Minimap plugin available
Pro Addons can be developed in Python
Pro Package for Linux ARM available
Pro Addon manager
Useful built-in addon manager.
Cons
Con Small community
Con No real Windows support
Will compile under CygWin.