Atom vs Kakoune: What are the differences?

Developers describe Atom as "A hackable text editor for the 21st Century". 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. 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..

Atom and Kakoune can be categorized as "Text Editor" tools.

Some of the features offered by Atom are:

• Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies
• Node.js integration
• Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core

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

"Free" is the primary reason why developers consider Atom over the competitors, whereas "Fast editing" was stated as the key factor in picking Kakoune.

Atom and Kakoune are both open source tools. Atom with 49.2K GitHub stars and 12.1K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Kakoune with 4.85K GitHub stars and 354 GitHub forks.