Software Alternatives & Reviews

MacVim VS Kakoune

Compare MacVim VS Kakoune and see what are their differences

MacVim logo MacVim

MacVim is a port of the text editor Vim to Mac OS X.

Kakoune logo Kakoune

Vim inspired — Faster as in less keystrokes — Multiple selections — Orthogonal design
  • MacVim Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-08
  • Kakoune Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-13

MacVim videos

Why is MacVim much faster than Vim in the Terminal?

More videos:

  • Review - MacVim | Astros a Star | Ep. 5

Kakoune videos

Kakoune Is A More Efficient Text Editor

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to MacVim and Kakoune)
Text Editors
22 22%
78% 78
IDE
23 23%
77% 77
Software Development
27 27%
73% 73
Productivity
11 11%
89% 89

User comments

Share your experience with using MacVim and Kakoune. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Kakoune should be more popular than MacVim. 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.

MacVim mentions (3)

  • Notepad Next
    gVim (only on windows/linux) with a minimal config is my preferred. Fast but a few powerful built-in vim features like search, replace, syntax highlighting, spellchecking, auto-indent etc. It loads in about 1.5s on my machine and renders the text nicely. Maybe take a look at https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim on mac, perhaps someone can comment about the state of macvim? - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Vim: The Best Way to Write Code?
    Vim (aka Vi IMproved) is a highly efficient text editor that has inspired other editors like it, most notably MacVim (which I will refer to as vim from here on) and gVim. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • Vim 9 - Update
    If you want to try out Vim9, you can download the latest Win32 binaries from: https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases. For MacOS, you can use https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/. Source: about 3 years ago

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 / about 1 month 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 / 11 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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What are some alternatives?

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

Neovim - Vim's rebirth for the 21st century

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.

Spacemacs - Community-driven Emacs distribution that meshes Emacs and Vim features.

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...