When comparing Kakoune vs CodeLite IDE, the Slant community recommends CodeLite IDE for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript IDEs or editors?” CodeLite IDE is ranked 22nd while Kakoune is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose CodeLite IDE is:
Including Laravel, WordPress, Drupal, jQuery, Bootstrap and so on
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 Advanced support for all popular framework
Including Laravel, WordPress, Drupal, jQuery, Bootstrap and so on
Pro Modest memory footprint
CodeLite takes up about 50 MB when loaded into memory with a workspace opened.
Pro Open source and free
CodeLite is licensed under GPL with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Extensive plugin support
Git, SFTP, Subversion, and many more plugins are fully supported in CodeLite IDE.
Pro Rapid development cycle
CodeLite is actively developed with activity almost daily on Github.
Pro Workspace view reminiscent of File Explorer
The workspace view, unlike other IDEs, is a reflection of the actual directory structure on the file system (with user filters applied).
Pro Excellent Node.js debugger
This makes fixing issues more efficiently and debugging code less painful.
Pro Intelligent code completion
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 Bland UI
The UI is fairly boring and has limited customization options. There is a dark theme available; however it only applies to the editor. The surrounding windows and borders remain light. You can see a collection of screenshots here.