As a windows user peering in: god do I wish this had proper Windows support!

I understand that parts of the app are baked into unix, but I would absolutely love support. I want to get into fast flow like hotkey driven text manipulation but I’m not convinced either Vim or especially Emacs are worth the time cost required to get to become proficient.

It seems absurd that for such a powerful idea, only this niche Kakoune has approached the concept with fresh design principles and an emphasis on discoverability. Would anyone suggest anything that might work for me on the Windows side?

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Basically it should work through WSL or Cygwin

That does look nice, and I’ll take another look when WSL2 comes out. For now, I’m wary of having my main editor be on an x11 server running on a sluggish WSL. It would be amazing if Kakoune could run on native Windows and then speak to WSL on the backend, as Visual Studio Code does… but my guess is that for now Kakoune has bigger priorities.

I use kakoune at work on WSL daily, have had no performance issues. It was slightly annoying to get the new client command working, but that’s more of an annoyance than real issue.

In fact, I do most of my work through WSL, Windows is more of a poor windows manager.

Edit: Noticed that you’re worrying about running kakoune on X11. While it’s possible to run X applications with WSL, kakoune is purely terminal based application, so you can run it under mintitty, which is a native windows terminal emulator and the setup that I use.

Thanks for the advice, I currently have poor I/O performance on WSL but I’ll get it running on mintitty and dabble until WSL2, then I’ll dive into it.

It amazes me that this is the only editor I have heard that is taking the flow and speed of modal editing in and modernizing it to make it intuitive and easy to learn, so I hope this project gains traction.

I know that there have been issues with windows defender, which dramatically slows down WSL performance. Maybe that’s what you’re experiencing?

I use Kakoune on Msys2 at work. It’s a little slow, but no problems.

For Kakoune natively on Windows, we’d need a native POSIX shell for it to interface with.
I found one, gsh, but haven’t tried anything with it.

In other news, WSL v2 (which seems to be available now) supposedly has some big performance improvements by running on a “real” Linux kernel.