Kakoune

Kakoune is a modal code editor that keeps Vi's model of keystrokes as a text editing language, but was redesigned around selections. It has normal and insertion modes. In normal mode, keys manipulate selections or the selected text. In insertion mode, keys are inserted before each selection's cursor. A selection is an oriented, inclusive range of characters with an anchor and a cursor, and there is always at least one.

Multiple selections are the central interaction mechanism. Selection primitives include selecting all regex matches inside current selections, keeping or discarding selections that match a regex, splitting selections with a regex, and text objects such as paragraphs, sentences and nestable blocks. Text manipulation primitives include aligning selections, rotating selection contents, case changes, indentation, and piping each selection through an external filter. Most commands give immediate, incremental feedback, and the project aims to match Vim on keystroke count.

Kakoune uses a client-server architecture, so several clients can attach to one editing session. Splits and panes are left to tmux, zellij, kitty, wezterm or the window manager, which spawn clients connected to the same session. Other documented features are macros, hooks, automatic contextual help, as-you-type completion, and syntax highlighting that supports multiple languages in one buffer and different highlighting per window. Configuration is loaded from autoload directories and a kakrc in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kak/ (or ~/.config/kak/).

It targets developers comfortable with modal editing who work in a Unix-like terminal environment. It builds with a C++20 compiler (GCC 10.3+ or clang 11+) on Linux, macOS and Cygwin. No native Windows version is planned.

Installation

# via Homebrew
brew install kakoune

# via apt
sudo apt install kakoune

# via Build from source
git clone https://github.com/mawww/kakoune.git
cd kakoune
make
./src/kak