awesome-tuis VS kakoune

Compare awesome-tuis vs kakoune and see what are their differences.

awesome-tuis

List of projects that provide terminal user interfaces (by rothgar)

kakoune

mawww's experiment for a better code editor (by mawww)
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awesome-tuis kakoune
25 108
6,233 9,516
- -
8.5 9.7
18 days ago 7 days ago
C++
- The Unlicense
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

awesome-tuis

Posts with mentions or reviews of awesome-tuis. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-08.
  • Contour: Modern and Fast Terminal Emulator
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Oct 2023
    > Editing multiline inputs is awful.

    Outside of "line at a time" i/o (a rarely used mode where an entire line is edited locally and then sent to the host), most of what users see is as interactive is controlled by the program you are interacting with. The terminal just takes commands from the host and does what it is told. BTW, line at a time mode isn't used that much. The only thing I use that uses line at a time mode is telenet in LINEMODE.

    > Navigating history is so-so

    Yes, that is because the program you are likely interacting with where history is relevant implements it's own repl or command line (i.e. bash, zsh, python, etc...) and it is responsible for it's own history and may implement it completely differently than say, bash or zsh.

    > Why are terminals always stuck in the 70s? Can I get a modern terminal?

    We do have a modern terminal: the web browser... and it's pretty nice.

    There have been a ton of tries at more modern terminals, but ultimately, they end up really being limited by the software running in the terminal session. In the 90s we had a ton of commercial terminal emulators that would allow you to create full guis, complete with dialogs and forms. In the 00's there were a few tries at terminals that would allow html output and embedding of html forms for input (can't remember the names of them). I suppose there's also the whole X11 thing... which is so good enough that it's really hard to kill.

    Let's get back to character mode:

    A lot of interactive terminal software is built using different libraries - so sometimes you get a terminal gui based on ncurses, terminal.gui, or something else... here's a list: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis#libraries. Most of these libraries try to use most of the features in your terminal emulator, but often, just use stuff that is in everything.

    For command line programs (i.e. just type a command), a lot of the experience is dictated by the parser used by the tool and whatever the underlying operating system has for passing arguments. Some shells and terminal emulators (like iTerm2 on mac) try to smooth this out, but again, there's a lot of variety in command line parsers.

    Probably the biggest modern improvement in the shell world was gettext and various command-line completion libraries which allows command parameter completion if the developer supports it or uses a parser that supports completion. But none of this is the terminal itself doing the work.

  • What can you do in a terminal?
    2 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 7 Mar 2023
    Check out this list of great TUI projects if you really want to see what terminal only is capable of.
  • I wrote a TUI snake game in BASH v5.1+
    4 projects | /r/linux | 10 Jan 2023
    This looks really cool! Would you mind PRing it to my awesome TUIs list? https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
  • Awesome CLI & TUI Applications Directory site
    8 projects | /r/commandline | 19 Nov 2022
    See also: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
  • Are there any TUI apps you recommend outside of ncdu / nnn / htop / vim / bat / fd / tig / duf?
    22 projects | /r/commandline | 12 Oct 2022
    Here's a good list
  • What's the most beautifully designed TUI-app you've used?
    2 projects | /r/commandline | 27 Sep 2022
    Have a browse at the awesome-tui list and in the reddit search bar: this question is asked quite often and there are already plenty of answers :)
  • [Possibly OT] Is there a list of command-line versions of any Unix/Linux GUI applications?
    2 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 19 Jul 2022
    https://github.com/toolleeo/cli-apps and https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis? Though it doesn't mention a specific GUI apps (eg, Lynx is under either Web Browser or Web on those lists), and it's just lists, no actual comparison or review etc. I usually found AlternativeTo to be somewhat decent start to see what features and alternatives I can expect across platform.
  • Hacker News top posts: Mar 17, 2022
    6 projects | /r/hackerdigest | 17 Mar 2022
    TUIs\ (155 comments)
  • TUIs
    2 projects | /r/hackernews | 16 Mar 2022
    33 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Mar 2022
    Github still has atom feeds for repos, for example: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis/commits/master.atom Unfortunately they don't really make links to these feeds very visible in the UI anymore. But toss that in your feed reader of choice and you'll get an update when the awesome list content changes.

kakoune

Posts with mentions or reviews of kakoune. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-20.
  • A tutorial for the Sam command language (1986) [pdf]
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Oct 2023
    And while it doesn’t use the sam language precisely, I think in the broader “postfix Vi with visual feedback” category Kakoune[1] also warrants mentioning. The command language, in my experience, feels much more logical than that of Vis coming from a blank slate (things might be different if you come from Vim, but even when I used Vim regularly I never used the editing language that much exactly because I could never remember the damn thing).

    And having mentioned Kakoune it’d probably be unfair to then not mention Helix[2]. It has a very similar editing language, but it’s a fairly anti-Unix everything-bolted-in affair on the inside (“everything works out of the box” being the advertising take) compared to Kakoune’s Acme-inspired no-scripting scripting (there’s an ex-style command to exec a user program that can then drive the editor over stdio RPC, a set of hooks, and that’s it). So if you’ve come for the Plan 9 feels, I don’t expect Helix to be that appealing. It’s still a good editor, nevertheless.

    [1] https://kakoune.org/

    [2] https://helix-editor.com/

  • Why Kakoune
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Sep 2023
    > I wonder if the author has ever heard of vis[0]

    Yes.

    https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Kakoun...

    https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki#onboarding

    > which imho fulfills far better each one of those premises

    Not very motivated for such a harsh critic..

  • Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Sep 2023
    I've been using Vim for years, but if there was one thing I could change, it would be the verb-noun order. The Kakoune[1] editor behaves mostly like Vim, but where Vim has `dw` as "delete word", Kakoune has it backwards: `wd`.

    It might sound minor, but by placing the range first, Kakoune can give a preview of what will be changed. The longer or more complicated the command, the more this feature shines.

    Strictly better as far as I know. A shame my muscle memory, and all default installations, are still stuck with Vim.

    [1] https://kakoune.org/

  • Ask HN: Where do I find good code to read?
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2023
  • Helix editor: Make HTTP requests and insert JSON
    6 projects | dev.to | 8 Jul 2023
    Helix is a postmodern text editor built in Rust built for the terminal. It is inspired by Kakoune, another Rust based text editor. Helix has got multiple selections, built-in Tree-sitter integration, powerful code manipulation and Language server support.
  • Introducing multicursors.nvim plugin
    5 projects | /r/neovim | 3 Jul 2023
  • Can we write a Neo-vim Successor using rust?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 1 Jul 2023
    Sorry if this is a noob question. So suddenly i had this question came to my mind about the helix editor and neovim. Can we write a neovim successor from using rust. i know that helix is inspired by Kakoune Just like that what if we could make a neovim successor using rust. currently helix can't be configured and modified like neovim. if there is a hope to make and vim like editor using rust with much better customization and better plugin support. if there to make an open-source project would you guys be interested in?
  • Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jun 2023
  • I don't need your query language
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jun 2023
    That's exactly the model used by the [Kakoune editor](https://kakoune.org/). It definitely feels more intuitive to me, but I personally didn't stick with it due to vim's ubiquity.
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jun 2023
    You might like kakoune (https://github.com/mawww/kakoune), which does exactly that: first you select the range (which can even be disjoint, e.g. all words matching a regex), then you operate on it. By default, the selected range is the character under cursor, and multiple cursors work out of the box.

    It also generally follows the Unix philosophy, e.g. by using shell script, pipes, and built-in Unix utilities to do complex operations, rather than inventing a new language (vimscript) for it.

    (Not affiliated with the creator, but kakoune has been my daily driver for years now.)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing awesome-tuis and kakoune you can also consider the following projects:

helix - A post-modern modal text editor.

micro-editor - A modern and intuitive terminal-based text editor

vis - A vi-like editor based on Plan 9's structural regular expressions

notcurses - blingful character graphics/TUI library. definitely not curses.

Yuescript - A Moonscript dialect compiles to Lua.

doom-emacs - An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker [Moved to: https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs]

neovim - Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability

SpaceVim - A community-driven modular vim/neovim distribution - The ultimate vimrc

sodium - Mirror of https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/sodium

dunst - Lightweight and customizable notification daemon

vim-sandwich - Set of operators and textobjects to search/select/edit sandwiched texts.

zee - A modern text editor for the terminal written in Rust [Moved to: https://github.com/zee-editor/zee]