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.