The videos don't seem to play on firefox 45.5.1
Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
61–70 of 329 posts
Re: Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
#62Modal text editors are definitely not my thing, but anyway this looks like a huge improvement on vim. Still a shame that it is entirely console-based. It's 2016 people! We've had GUIs for literally decades.
Interesting, if he's architected it for that purpose, it doesn't have to solely be console based.
Neovim separated the client and server parts, and there are a host of clients (QT, HTML/Atom, etc) including the canonical one, from the docs:
When compiled with the |+clientserver| option, Vim can act as a command
server. It accepts messages from a client and executes them. At the same
time, Vim can function as a client and send commands to a Vim server.
Maybe Kakoune does the same, I haven't checked. I also second the first child's note that being console based is a feature.
Re: Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
#63Modal text editors are definitely not my thing, but anyway this looks like a huge improvement on vim. Still a shame that it is entirely console-based. It's 2016 people! We've had GUIs for literally decades.
What would a GUI bring to this that isn't possible in the console? You can use a mouse to issue commands to console programs, after all: if you want to use your mouse to scroll through or select regions of text, you can.
I find that console apps are far less intuitive when it comes to visual thinkers. I also am not too keen on modal editing, it doesn't match how I do most things in life. I don't have to switch out my teeth when eating vs drinking. It just doesn't seem natural to me. I've always found I'm more productive with a GUI. Command line is great for simple tasks and executing commands, but editing files has always seemed less than ideal. You have to remember so many key combinations and commands and track what mode you are in and what modes are available. I would rather spend that brain power on solving problems.
Re: Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if you are like me and work in many different languages, you'll have to spend 10 weeks to learn 10 different IDEs, rather than 8 months to learn one Vim.
The ones I have used (IntelliJ, Netbeans and eclipse) were quite effortless to jump between. I doubt Visual Studio will be much harder. Jetbrains covers Ruby, Python, JS, C and more and it would surprise me bigtime if those language specific versions aren't quite similar to the plain Java version as well.
I think Vim is far easier to learn than Visual Studio. The menus are completely unintuitive, bureaucratic and painful to use.
I always use cl.exe from the command line with Makefiles.
Re: Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
#65A better vim sounds great. That said I suspect most people would be better off learning a good IDE properly, including but not limited to: * effective navigation and selection using modifier keys and search * built in refactoring * project wide as well as single file search/replace, -and this includes regex search AND replace. This should be quite doable in less than a week compared to a few months to get equally eff…
> That said I suspect most people would be better off learning a good IDE properly, including but not limited to: To be clear, do you think a "good IDE" is inherently better than Vim/Kako for most people? Personally i don't see a difference in a GUI based editor and a text based editor. In fact, i quite prefer text based, because it forces an editor to treat the keyboard as a first class citizen - GUI IDEs can get la…
To be clear, do you think a "good IDE" is inherently better than Vim/Kako for most people?
Right now, for most people: very much yes.
Personally i don't see a difference in a GUI based editor and a text based editor. In fact, i quite prefer text based, because it forces an editor to treat the keyboard as a first class citizen - GUI IDEs can get lazy and revert to mouse whenever they please.
Fair point. However: Between the default keybindings of Netbeans on Windows or Linux and the simplicity of customising it to my hearts content I haven't found any reason to abandon it.
I can see the argument that Vim might not be inherently as good as a "good" GUI editor, but i don't think that is a negative towards the potential of text based editors. It just means that we need new editors to focus on the UX, imo.
Here is where I'll argue that the main advantage of the big IDEs are that they have focused on UX for years.
Re: Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ones I have used (IntelliJ, Netbeans and eclipse) were quite effortless to jump between. I doubt Visual Studio will be much harder. Jetbrains covers Ruby, Python, JS, C and more and it would surprise me bigtime if those language specific versions aren't quite similar to the plain Java version as well.
I think Vim is far easier to learn than Visual Studio. The menus are completely unintuitive, bureaucratic and painful to use. I always use cl.exe from the command line with Makefiles.
How long have you used each of them and for what?
Re: Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would a GUI bring to this that isn't possible in the console? You can use a mouse to issue commands to console programs, after all: if you want to use your mouse to scroll through or select regions of text, you can.
> What would a GUI bring to this that isn't possible in the console? Not being destructive of user input, for starters.
Not sure I understand what you mean.
Re: Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm thinking about whether this is a good idea. He gets vi/Vim's model slightly wrong by saying it's "verb then object". While that is true for some things (i.e. text objects, like "ciw" for "change inner word"), it's not true in general. The general rule is "verb then motion". In "dw" ("delete word"), the "w" doesn't represent an object, it represents a motion (going one word forward). It's the same motion that I ca…
>How would that work if the motion comes first? Would I go "wwwwd"? Would that delete one word, or four? 'w' will move the current selection to the next word so only one word. To extend the selection you need to press 'W' so "wWWWd" will delete four words. For most motions (if not all), the uppercase variant will extend the current selection. This also makes searching slightly different: / search forwards ? extend se…
Can you add counts to motions/objects? I.e. does "3w" select three words you can act on, or do you have to go "wWW"?
Re: Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
#69This looks awesome (although I think the name could use a little work). It also brings up a question I have for HN: Every few years, I make an attempt to learn to use one of the classic editors like vim or emacs, and inevitably give up after the enormous productivity drop I suffer when writing code. I just can't seem to pick up the muscle memory required to become fast with these tools, and the overwhelming array of…
Definitely not.
I learned vim for three month. After a vimrc of close to 150 lines, I had to admit that sublime text has more functionality than vim and all of them are far more difficult and slow to use (long and hard to memorize command names). It's even worst compared with IDEA.
Now I only use vim as my default editor in terminal.
Just use sublime, or even better, IDEA.
Re: Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
#70what's the font that is used on the screenshots ? I would love to try it in Pycharm IDE/Jetbrain products.
The font is called terminus