kakoune VS alacritty

Helix's modal editing is based on Kakoune's modal editing which is like an evolution to Vim's modal editing. You can think of it as being always in selection (visual) mode. https://github.com/mawww/kakoune?tab=readme-ov-file#selectio...

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/

You can take a look at kakoune. The source code (excluding documentations, test cases, customizations etc.) is less than 40k. It is, IMHO, a show case of a C++ project in use.

> 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..

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/

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.

It's opinionated, which comes with upsides and downsides. I won't blame the maintainer to keep things focused, feature creep (even for worthy features) can kill a FOSS project.

Another example is sixel support, there's a fork where it all works but is not sufficiently "proven" (code quality just as well as sixel being the best fit for the problem)

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/pull/4763#issuecommen...

It may be annoying but I get the reasoning, and there are other terminals.

alacritty (Linux, Macos & Windows)

> Ligatures: ok, nice, possible in terms too (hopefully Alacritty one day)

I wouldn't hold my breath. Seems like its getting the iPad calculator treatment[0]. Which is to say rather than ship something working that can be improved, they're leaving a UX void.

[0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50

IME, this is like the golden age of terminal apps in general and macOS-compatible ones in particular. There are several really good terminals for macOS:

[iTerm2 app](https://iterm2.com/)

[Kitty terminal](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/)

[WezTerm terminal](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/index.html)

[Alacritty](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty)

My daily driver is WezTerm…

- Runs on Linux, macOS, Windows 10 and FreeBSD

- [Multiplex terminal panes, tabs and windows on local and remote hosts, with native mouse and scrollback](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html)

- [Ligatures](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#fira-code-monospaced-font...), Color Emoji and font fallback, with true color and [dynamic color schemes](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/appearance.html#colors).

- [Hyperlinks](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/hyperlinks.html)

- [Searchable Scrollback](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/scrollback.html) (use mouse wheel and `Shift-PageUp` and `Shift PageDown` to navigate, Ctrl-Shift-F to activate search mode)

- xterm style selection of text with mouse; paste selection via `Shift-Insert` (bracketed paste is supported!)

- SGR style mouse reporting (works in vim and tmux)

- Render underline, double-underline, italic, bold, strikethrough (most other terminal emulators do not support as many render attributes)

- Configuration via a [configuration file](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/files.html) with hot reloading

- Multiple Windows (Hotkey: `Super-N`)

- Splits/Panes (Split horizontally/vertically: `Ctrl-Shift-Alt-%` and `Ctrl-Shift-Alt-"`, move between panes: `Ctrl-Shift-ArrowKey`)

- Tabs (Hotkey: `Super-T`, next/prev: `Super-Shift-[` and `Super-Shift-]`, go-to: `Super-[1-9]`)

- [SSH client with native tabs](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/ssh.html)

- [Connect to serial ports for embedded/Arduino work](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/serial.html)

- Connect to a local multiplexer server over unix domain sockets

- Connect to a remote multiplexer using SSH or TLS over TCP/IP

- iTerm2 compatible image protocol support, and built-in [imgcat command](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/imgcat.html)

- Kitty graphics support

- Sixel graphics support (experimental: starting in `20200620-160318-e00b076c`)

# We use Alacritty's default Linux config directory as our storage location here. mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty/themes git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty-theme ~/.config/alacritty/themes

if by 'in the terminal' you mean 'in a program emulating an ascii terminal' then no, because ascii terminals don't support anything that looks better than ascii art. they don't support sixel either. there are a variety of proposals for how to add graphics to ascii terminal emulators in a backwards-compatible way, such as mgr and notty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/51

but the 'terminal' that a terminal emulator is emulating is a device which provides a user access to a remote computer. normally nowadays this is a laptop or cellphone. in that case, yes, you can use x-windows, xpra, vnc, or a web browser

A decent terminal application (i.e: iterm2, alacritty, etc.)

I have been having random input lags with Alacritty. Initially I thought it was my custom neovim config. After some investigation, I have found an Alacritty github issue where users are reporting the same issue: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6844

Thank you for your suggestions. I have now narrow it down to my terminal emulator. Alacritty. More precisely this issue: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6844