When comparing Kakoune vs Microsoft's Visual Studio, the Slant community recommends Microsoft's Visual Studio for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript IDEs or editors?” Microsoft's Visual Studio is ranked 17th while Kakoune is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose Microsoft's Visual Studio is:
Javascript Intellisense allows Visual Studio to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code.
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 Javascript Intellisense support
Javascript Intellisense allows Visual Studio to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code.
Pro Clean UI
Visual Studio has a clean, intuitive user interface.
Pro Cloud storage
Your Visual Studio online account gives you a place to store your code, backlog, and other project data with no servers to deploy, configure, or manage.
Pro Product backlog
In agile development teams, one really needs features such as product backlogs where you can assign features to teammates and track their progress on them. VS provides a web-based interface for you to track your team's complete progress on the project.
Pro Very good XML/XSD support
Syntax highlighting, Intellisense, and jump to declaration all work in XML documents.
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 Tons of feature bloat
If you're doing simple web frontend dev, then VS is far too arcane and feature bloated for most of your work.
Con Not cross-platform
Visual Studio is only available on Windows, which causes platform lock-in.
Con Slow
Visual Studio can be quite laggy.
Con Takes up a lot of space
Visual Studio can use about 6 GBs which a lot of space to be taken from your computer.
Con Terribly slow development
Keep dreaming about features already provided by alternative products.
Con Non-native window frame
The IDE main window lacks a standard window frame (titlebar/borders). A custom solution is used where the custom titlebar contains numerous application-specific controls. This results in inconsistent UX and can also be problematic when you're using shell replacements or other various window-management software (such as bbLean).