kakoune

mawww's experiment for a better code editor (by mawww)

Kakoune Alternatives

Similar projects and alternatives to kakoune

  1. neovim

    1,429 kakoune VS neovim

    Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability

  2. InfluxDB

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  3. nvim-lspconfig

    Quickstart configs for Nvim LSP

  4. helix

    449 kakoune VS helix

    A post-modern modal text editor.

  5. alacritty

    A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.

  6. coc.nvim

    322 kakoune VS coc.nvim

    Nodejs extension host for vim & neovim, load extensions like VSCode and host language servers.

  7. kitty

    316 kakoune VS kitty

    Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal

  8. nvim-cmp

    A completion plugin for neovim coded in Lua.

  9. SaaSHub

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  10. micro-editor

    A modern and intuitive terminal-based text editor

  11. wezterm

    156 kakoune VS wezterm

    A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust

  12. prql

    129 kakoune VS prql

    PRQL is a modern language for transforming data — a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement

  13. meow

    79 kakoune VS meow

    Yet another modal editing on Emacs / 猫态编辑 (by meow-edit)

  14. vis

    60 kakoune VS vis

    A vi-like editor based on Plan 9's structural regular expressions (by martanne)

  15. Warp

    Warp is a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in so you and your team can build great software, faster.

  16. vim-visual-multi

    47 kakoune VS vim-visual-multi

    Multiple cursors plugin for vim/neovim

  17. vim-go

    25 kakoune VS vim-go

    Go development plugin for Vim

  18. zee

    12 kakoune VS zee

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

  19. kakoune.el

    10 kakoune VS kakoune.el

    A very simple simulation of the kakoune editor inside of emacs.

  20. YueScript

    A MoonScript dialect compiles to Lua.

  21. dance

    7 kakoune VS dance

    Make your cursors dance with Kakoune-like modal editing in VS Code. (by 71)

  22. clippy.el

    6 kakoune VS clippy.el

    Show tooltip with function documentation at point

  23. SaaSHub

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a better kakoune alternative or higher similarity.

kakoune discussion

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kakoune reviews and mentions

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 2025-05-19.
  • Kilo: A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 May 2025
    Kakoune has been my main editor for the past year (give or take) and uses an array of lines [0]. Ironically, multi-cursor and regex are some of the main features that made it attractive to me.

    I just tested it out on the 100MB enwik8 file I have laying around and it does slow down significantly (took 4-5 seconds to load in the file and has a 1 second delay on changing a line). But that is not really the type of file you would be opening with your main editor.

    [0]: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/blob/2d8c0b8bf0d7d18218d4c9...

  • Show HN: Ki Editor
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Sep 2024
    Fascinating idea!

    To summarize for those who know [Kakoune](https://github.com/mawww/kakoune) or [Helix](https://github.com/helix-editor/helix), the idea is that every command has the form ["selection mode" -> "movement" -> "action"](https://ki-editor.github.io/ki-editor/comparisons/modal-edit...) instead of Kakoune's movement->action.

    So, instead of having separate commands for "next character", "next word", "next structural element", there is one command for "next" (as well as [a few additional motions](https://ki-editor.github.io/ki-editor/normal-mode/core-movem...)). Every command starts with a ["selection mode"](https://ki-editor.github.io/ki-editor/normal-mode/selection-...) like "column", "line", or "structural element".

  • Learning to Like Neovim
    4 projects | dev.to | 18 Aug 2024
    Still, I am open to new advancements in the field of text editors. I am keeping an eye on Kakoune, Helix and Zed, for example.
  • Kakoune Editor Release 2024.05.09
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 10 May 2024
  • Multi-cursor code editing: An animated introduction
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2024
  • Helix: Release 24.03 Highlights
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Mar 2024
    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...
  • Kakoune
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jan 2024
  • Kakoune Code Editor
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Nov 2023
  • 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/

  • What is the best book for complete beginner?
    1 project | /r/cpp_questions | 2 Oct 2023
    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.
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Stats

Basic kakoune repo stats
114
10,267
9.4
2 days ago

mawww/kakoune is an open source project licensed under The Unlicense which is an OSI approved license.

The primary programming language of kakoune is C++.


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