When comparing Kakoune vs Qt Creator, the Slant community recommends Kakoune for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Kakoune is ranked 11th while Qt Creator is ranked 19th. 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
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 Great syntax highlighting and auto-completion
Qt Creator has a code model which basically has the same information as the compiler. So it can do really nice syntax highlighting (e.g. of virtual methods or local variables) as well as provide great code completion.
Pro Integrates well with non-IDE workflows
Qt Creator uses normal .pro-files, CMakeLists.txt, Makefiles.am, etc. for its projects and rarely needs special configuration for projects.
Projects can be built on the command line as usual.
Pro Built-in Qt GUI editor
Allows for the creation of a window based UI in a graphical editor, no code required to build the UI.
Pro Fast and fully keyboard-navigatable
Responsive UI, no need to use the mouse for the power users.
Pro Supports CMake
Pro Very responsive when compared to similar software
Pro Much space dedicated to the code
Small and beautiful UI, almost all the space is dedicated to the text with hardly and toolbars. Can actually be used on a 1024x768 pixel screen.
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 Poor refactoring
QtCreator has lack of refactoring features. It's not even close to Resharper++ or CLion.
Con Poor multi-window mode support
While multiple windows are supported, many operations will activate in the primary window (debug, goto-line... etc).
Con Qt-focused
Qt Creator is focused on being an IDE for Qt, as a general purpose IDE it performs quite well, but there are areas which are lacking such as project file support (support for generic/CMake projects lags behind Qt projects).