Why Kakoune – The Quest For a Better Code Editor

Improving on the editing model

vi basic grammar is verb followed by object; it’s nice because it matches
well with the order we use in English, “delete word”. On the other hand,
it does not match well with the nature of what we express: There is only
a handful of verbs in text editing (delete, yank, paste,
insert…​), and they don’t compose, contrarily to objects which can be
arbitrarily complex, and difficult to express. That means that errors are
not handled well. If you express your object wrongly with a delete verb,
the wrong text will get deleted, you will need to undo, and try again.

Kakoune’s grammar is object followed by verb, combined with instantaneous
feedback, that means you always see the current object (In Kakoune we call
that the selection) before you apply your change, which allows you to correct
errors on the go.

Kakoune tries hard to fix one of the big problems with the vi model: its
lack of interactivity. Because of the verb followed by object grammar,
vi changes are made in the dark, we don’t see their effect until the whole
editing sentence is finished. 5dw will delete to next five words, if
you then realize that was one word too many, you need to undo, go back to
your initial position, and try again with 4dw. In Kakoune, you would do
5W, see immediately that one more word than expected was selected, type
BH to remove that word from the selection, then d to delete. At each
step you get visual feedback, and have the opportunity to correct it.

At the lower level, the problem is that vi treats moving around and selecting
an object as two different things. Kakoune unifies that, moving is selecting.
w does not just go to the next word, it selects from current position to
the next word. By convention, capital commands tend to expand the selection,
so W would expand the current selection to the next word.

Multiple selections

Another particular feature of Kakoune is its support for, and emphasis
towards the use of multiple selections. Multiple selections in Kakoune
are not just one additional feature, it is the central way of interacting
with your text. For example there is no such thing as a “global replace” in
Kakoune. What you would do is select the whole buffer with the % command,
then select all matches for a regex in the current selections (that is the
whole buffer here) with the s command, which prompts for a regex. You would
end up with one selection for each match of your regex and use the insert
mode to do your change. Globally replacing foo with bar would be done with
%sfoocbar which is just the combination of basic building blocks.

Multiple selections provides us with a very powerful means to express structural
selection: we can subselect matches inside the current selections, keep
selections containing/not containing a match, split selections on a regex,
swap selections contents…​

For example, convert from snake_case_style to camelCaseStyle can be done
by selecting the word (with w for example) then subselecting underscores
in the word with s_, deleting these with d, then upper casing the
selected characters with ~. The inverse operation could be done by selecting
the word, then subselecting the upper case characters with s[A-Z]
lower casing them with ` and then inserting an underscore before them with
i_ This operation could be put in a macro, and would be reusable
easily to convert any identifier.

Another example would be parameter swapping, if you had func(arg2, arg1);
you could select the contents of the parenthesis with (, split the
selection on comma with S, , and swap selection contents with .

It is as well easy to use multiple selections for alignment, as the &
command will align all selection cursors by inserting blanks before
selection start

Or to use multiple selections as a way to gather some text from different
places and regroup it in another place, thanks to a special form of pasting
that will paste every yanked selections instead of the first one.

Interactive, predictable and fast

A design goal of Kakoune is to beat vim at its own game, while providing a
cleaner editing model. The combination of multiple selections and cleaned up
grammar shows that it’s possible to have text edition that is interactive,
predictable, and fast at the same time.

Interactivity comes from providing feedback on every command, made possible by
the inverted object then verb grammar. Every selection modification
has direct visual feedback; regex-based selections incrementally show what
will get selected, including when the regular expression is invalid; and even
yanking some text displays a message notifying how many selections were yanked.

Predictability comes from the simple effect of most commands. Each command is
conceptually simple, doing one single thing. d deletes whatever is selected,
nothing more. % selects the whole buffer. s prompts for a regex and
selects matches in the previous selection. It is the combination of these
building blocks that allows for complex, but predictable, actions on the text.

Being fast, as in requiring fewer keystrokes, is provided by carefully designing
the set of editing commands so that they interact well together, and by sometimes
sacrificing beauty for useability. For example, is equivalent to
S^: they both split on new lines, but this is such a common use case that
it deserves to have its own key shortcut. As shown in http://github.com/mawww/golf,
Kakoune manages to beat Vim at the keystroke count game in most cases,
using much more idiomatic commands.

Discoverability

Keyboard oriented programs tend to be at a disadvantage compared to GUI
applications because they are less discoverable; there is no menu bar on
which to click to see the available options, no tooltip appearing when you
hover above a button explaining what it does.

Kakoune solves this problem through the use of two mechanisms: extensive
completion support, and auto-information display.

When a command is written in a prompt, Kakoune will automatically open a menu
providing you with the available completions for the current parameter. It
will know if the parameter is supposed to be a word against a fixed set
of word, the name of a buffer, a filename, etc…​ Actually, as soon as :
is typed, entering command prompt mode, the list of existing commands will
be displayed in the completion menu.

Additionally, Kakoune will display an information box, describing what the
command does, what optional switches it can take, what they do…​

That information box gets displayed in other cases, for example if the g
key is hit, which then waits for another key (g is the goto commands
prefix), an information box will display all the recognized keys, informing
the user that Kakoune is waiting on a keystroke, and listing the available
options.

To go even further in discoverability, the auto information system can
be set to display an information box after each normal mode keystroke,
explaining what the key pressed just did.

Extensive completion support

Keyboard oriented programs are much easier to work with when they provide
extensive completion support. For a long time, completion has been prefix
based, and that has been working very well.

More recently, we started to see more and more programs using the so called
fuzzy completion. Fuzzy completion tends to be subsequence based, instead
of prefix based, which means the typed query needs to be a subsequence of
a candidate to be considered matching, instead of a prefix. That will generate
more candidates (all prefix matches are also subsequence matches), so it
needs a good ranking algorithm to sort the matches and put the best ones first.

Kakoune embraces fuzzy matching for its completion support, which kicks in both
during insert mode, and prompt mode.

Insert mode completion provides completion suggestions while inserting in the
buffer, it can complete words from the buffer, or from all buffers, lines,
filenames, or get completion candidates from an external source, making it
possible to implement intelligent code completion.

Prompt completion is displayed whenever we enter command mode, and provides
completion candidates that are adapted to the command being entered, and to
the current argument being edited.

A better unix citizen

Easily making programs cooperate with each others is one of the main strength
of the Unix environment. Kakoune is designed to integrate nicely with a POSIX
system: various text editing commands give direct access to the power of POSIX
tools, like |, which prompts for a shell command and pipe selections through
it, replacing their contents with the command output, or $ that prompts for
a command, and keeps selections for which the command returned success.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Kakoune is very easily controllable from
the shell, just pipe whatever commands you like to kak -p , and the
target Kakoune session will execute these.

Kakoune command line also supports shell expansion, similar to what $(...)
does in a shell. If you type echo %sh{ echo hello } in the command prompt,
“hello” will get displayed in the status line. Various values from Kakoune
can be accessed in these expand through environment variables, which, along
with shell scripting forms the basis of Kakoune extension model.

This model, although a bit less familiar than integrating a scripting language,
is conceptually very simple, relatively simple implementation-wise, and is
expressive enough to implement a custom code completer, linters, formatters…​

Moreover, combined with support for fifo buffers, that read data from a
named fifo, Kakoune ends up with an extension model that easily support
asynchronous tasks, by forking a shell in the background to do long lived
work (grep or make for example) while displaying the result as they
come through the fifo.

Kakoune also tries to limit its scope to code editing: in particular, it does
not try to manage windows, and lets the system’s window manager, or terminal
multiplexer (such as tmux), handle that responsibility. This is achieved through
a client/server design: An editing session runs on a server process, and
multiple clients can connect to that session to display different buffers.