Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

CotEditor

13
24
+ 1
3
Kakoune

19
36
+ 1
30
Add tool

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.

Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of CotEditor
Pros of Kakoune
  • 3
    Excellent support for Japanese encoding
  • 7
    Multiple selections
  • 7
    Fast editing
  • 5
    Interactivity
  • 4
    Consistency of the underlying language
  • 4
    UNIX citizen
  • 3
    Self documented

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

What is CotEditor?

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

What is Kakoune?

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.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use CotEditor?
What companies use Kakoune?
    No companies found
    See which teams inside your own company are using CotEditor or Kakoune.
    Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What are some alternatives to CotEditor and Kakoune?
    BBEdit
    It has been crafted to serve the needs of writers, Web authors and software developers, and provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of prose, source code, and textual data.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    See all alternatives