Emacs vs Kakoune

Overview

Emacs

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.2K

Votes322

Kakoune

Stacks19

Followers36

Votes30

GitHub Stars10.6K

Forks751

Emacs vs Kakoune: What are the differences?

Emacs: The extensible self-documenting text editor. 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; Kakoune: 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..

Emacs and Kakoune belong to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Emacs are:

Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.
Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.

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

"Vast array of extensions" is the primary reason why developers consider Emacs over the competitors, whereas "Fast editing" was stated as the key factor in picking Kakoune.

Kakoune is an open source tool with 4.85K GitHub stars and 354 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Kakoune's open source repository on GitHub.

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Detailed Comparison

Emacs	Kakoune
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.	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.
Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.;Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.;Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.;Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.;A large number of extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more. Many of these extensions are distributed with GNU Emacs others are available separately.	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 -	GitHub Stars 10.6K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 751
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 19
Followers 1.2K	Followers 36
Votes 322	Votes 30
Pros & Cons
Pros 65 Vast array of extensions 44 Have all you can imagine 40 Everything i need in one place 39 Portability 32 Customer config Cons 4 So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked 4 Hard to learn for beginners 1 Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux	Pros 7 Multiple selections 7 Fast editing 5 Interactivity 4 Consistency of the underlying language 4 UNIX citizen

What are some alternatives to Emacs, 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.

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 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.

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.