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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. CotEditor vs Kakoune

CotEditor vs Kakoune

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

CotEditor
CotEditor
Stacks13
Followers24
Votes3
GitHub Stars7.3K
Forks465
Kakoune
Kakoune
Stacks19
Followers36
Votes30
GitHub Stars10.6K
Forks751

CotEditor vs Kakoune: What are the differences?

Developers describe CotEditor as "Open Source Plain-Text Editor for OS X". CotEditor is a lightweight plain-text editor for OS X. On the other hand, Kakoune is detailed as "Vim inspired — Faster as in less keystrokes — Multiple selections — Orthogonal design". Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode..

CotEditor and Kakoune can be primarily classified as "Text Editor" tools.

Some of the features offered by CotEditor are:

  • Syntax Highlighting
  • Powerful Find & Replace
  • Setting via Click

On the other hand, Kakoune provides the following key features:

  • Multiple selections as a central way of interacting
  • Powerful selection manipulation primitives
  • Powerful text manipulation primitives

"Excellent support for Japanese encoding" is the top reason why over 2 developers like CotEditor, while over 6 developers mention "Fast editing" as the leading cause for choosing Kakoune.

CotEditor and Kakoune are both open source tools. Kakoune with 4.85K GitHub stars and 354 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than CotEditor with 2.77K GitHub stars and 252 GitHub forks.

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Detailed Comparison

CotEditor
CotEditor
Kakoune
Kakoune

CotEditor is a lightweight plain-text editor for OS X.

Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones. Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode.

Syntax Highlighting;Powerful Find & Replace;Setting via Click;Outline Menu;Split View;Character Inspector;Scriptable;Incompatible Characters;CJK Language Friendly
Multiple selections as a central way of interacting;Powerful selection manipulation primitives;Powerful text manipulation primitives;Client-Server architecture;Simple interaction with external programs
Statistics
GitHub Stars
7.3K
GitHub Stars
10.6K
GitHub Forks
465
GitHub Forks
751
Stacks
13
Stacks
19
Followers
24
Followers
36
Votes
3
Votes
30
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 3
    Excellent support for Japanese encoding
Pros
  • 7
    Fast editing
  • 7
    Multiple selections
  • 5
    Interactivity
  • 4
    UNIX citizen
  • 4
    Consistency of the underlying language

What are some alternatives to CotEditor, Kakoune?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

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