Software Alternatives & Reviews

Kakoune VS Spacemacs

Compare Kakoune VS Spacemacs and see what are their differences

Kakoune logo Kakoune

Vim inspired — Faster as in less keystrokes — Multiple selections — Orthogonal design

Spacemacs logo Spacemacs

Community-driven Emacs distribution that meshes Emacs and Vim features.
  • Kakoune Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-13
  • Spacemacs Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-26

Kakoune videos

Kakoune Is A More Efficient Text Editor

Spacemacs videos

Spacemacs For Noobs

More videos:

  • Review - Can VSCode be a reasonable Spacemacs alternative? (VSpaceCode)
  • Review - EmacsCast 4 - Spacemacs vs Doom vs Emacs

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Kakoune and Spacemacs)
Text Editors
53 53%
47% 47
IDE
56 56%
44% 44
Software Development
59 59%
41% 41
Productivity
54 54%
46% 46

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Kakoune and Spacemacs

Kakoune Reviews

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Spacemacs Reviews

Top 8 Sublime Text Alternatives You Can Use in 2019
Spacemacs uses the space bar as a default leader key, which is where the program gets its name from. The syntax highlighting feature on Spacemacs is enabled by default for all major programming languages, and it is configurable manually through configuration files as well as via internal commands. For all its positives, the program can be quite a bit glitchy at times. From...
Source: beebom.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Kakoune should be more popular than Spacemacs. It has been mentiond 9 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Kakoune mentions (9)

  • Helix: Release 24.03 Highlights
    Helix's modal editing is based on Kakoune's modal editing which is like an evolution to Vim's modal editing. You can think of it as being always in selection (visual) mode. https://github.com/mawww/kakoune?tab=readme-ov-file#selectio.... - Source: Hacker News / 27 days ago
  • I don't need your query language
    You might like kakoune (https://github.com/mawww/kakoune), which does exactly that: first you select the range (which can even be disjoint, e.g. All words matching a regex), then you operate on it. By default, the selected range is the character under cursor, and multiple cursors work out of the box. It also generally follows the Unix philosophy, e.g. By using shell... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • I use nano BTW.
    It might be worth checking out kakoune if you are experimenting with editors. It’s supposed to be equally powerful to vim but much easier to learn. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Mle is a small, flexible, terminal-based text editor written in C
    For that, try Kakoune[1], which is modal with a mostly-postfix language instead of vi's usually-prefix one and uses this to also be a multiple-selections editor with immediate visual feedback. It falls too much into the uncanny valley of almost-but-not-quite-vi for some people, though. [1] https://kakoune.org/, https://github.com/mawww/kakoune. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • CppCon 2022
    I think the text editor, [Kakoune](https://github.com/mawww/kakoune), was written as an experiment in modern C++ language features. Its documentation says it requires a C++20 compiler, though I don't imagine it was originally for that version, since it was started before 2020. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
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Spacemacs mentions (6)

  • Our teacher only allows us to use VIM
    Show them spacemacs.org, github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs or at least spacevim.org. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Creating Haskell notebooks with org-mode
    Your Emacs will need some packages: org, org-babel and haskell-mode. If you use spacemacs it is enough to add these layers in your .spacemacs:. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Vim Users! Share your Clever Configs and Plugin Setups (or learn something new)🔥
    Try https://spacemacs.org magit + org-mode are the big selling points. Magit especially for programming. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Emacs' org-mode gets citation support
    Aside from editing on mobile devices, I think Emacs isn't as hard to pick up as it once was. It's certainly not easy but tools like Spacemacs or Doom make it much simpler to get started and really limit the need to create and edit a complicated little library of your Elisp code. http://spacemacs.org https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • A guide to create tmux like Custom Layouts in Spacemacs
    Coming from a vim world with tmux, I had really missed the multiple split window layout in Spacemacs. But after knowing how to define custom layouts this seemed to be an easy exercise for me. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Kakoune and Spacemacs, you can also consider the following products

Atom - At GitHub, we’re building the text editor we’ve always wanted: hackable to the core, but approachable on the first day without ever touching a config file. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.

Vim - Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing

Visual Studio Code - Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft

Light Table - Light Table is a new interactive IDE that lets you modify running programs and embed anything from...

GNU Emacs - GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more.

Neovim - Vim's rebirth for the 21st century