Atom vs Kakoune

Overview

Atom

Stacks16.9K

Followers14.5K

Votes2.5K

GitHub Stars60.8K

Forks17.3K

Kakoune

Stacks19

Followers36

Votes30

GitHub Stars10.6K

Forks751

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.

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Advice on Atom, Kakoune

Andrey

Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers

May 18, 2020

Decided

Since communication with Github is not necessary, the Atom is less convenient in working with text and code. Sublim's support and understanding of projects is best for us. Notepad for us is a completely outdated solution with an unacceptable interface. We use a good theme for Sublim ayu-dark

539k views539k

Comments

René

Sr. Financial Analyst

Aug 21, 2020

Review

I have used and like them both... here's my take on what to use in your case.

Use whatever software your instructor is using when learning a language. It makes it simpler to start. Then change to whatever you like.
Use an IDE (Integrated Development Enviroment). For Java I'd pick InteliJ (because I have found the Jetbrains IDEs great) or Visual Studio as a second pick (because it's free for individual coders).
Pick your text editor: the Atom vs Notepad++, vs others question Both Atom and Notepad++ offer many features and add-ons, making it a long-disputed competition. This is what drives to chose between one and the other, and I have been alternating: On Atom: The good:

Good looking coding environment
Good autocomplete
Project focused structure to your files The bad:
Higher system resources usage
Slower loading time (if you are opening and closing)

Notepad++ The good:

Very light system resources use
Fast and simple, with decent code higlighting
Loads very fast The bad:
Not as pretty as Atom
Autocomplete and syntax checking is not that good
File-focused editing

483 views483

Comments

Shail

None at None

Oct 19, 2020

Review

Hi, I have used PyCharm, Sublime Text and Atom. PyCharm is very heavy and it contains many extra functions which have not any use for beginner. Atom has slow startup but after that is runs smoothly but not recommended for weak hardware. Atom has great community and bunch plugin support. You can manually install plugins in atom with you need. Sublime Text is really very fast and I think it can smoothly run on weak hardware. I personally using Atom on one computer and VScode on other computer both are great but VScode has better startup time.

At end IDE is not going to make you a pro. When I was beginner I used notepad and then Atom for working fast. I used a simple text editor named MousePad for many months because I got syntax highlighting for mine very weak PC.

460 views460

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Atom	Kakoune
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.	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 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;File system browser;Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files;Fast project-wide search and replace;Multiple cursors and selections;Multiple panes;Snippets;Code folding;A clean preferences UI;Import TextMate grammars and themes	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 60.8K	GitHub Stars 10.6K
GitHub Forks 17.3K	GitHub Forks 751
Stacks 16.9K	Stacks 19
Followers 14.5K	Followers 36
Votes 2.5K	Votes 30
Pros & Cons
Pros 529 Free 449 Open source 343 Modular design 321 Hackable 316 Beautiful UI Cons 19 Slow with large files 7 Slow startup 2 Most of the time packages are hard to find. 1 No longer maintained 1 Cannot Run code with F5	Pros 7 Multiple selections 7 Fast editing 5 Interactivity 4 Consistency of the underlying language 4 UNIX citizen
Integrations
GitHub	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Atom, Kakoune?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

Related Comparisons

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 vs Kakoune