Hi everyone! I finally moved back to Kakoune after a long time (~2 years). I have everything set up the way I want and I’m relearning Kakoune slowly, it’s fun! Albeit I wasn’t able to change the terminal assitant. I remember it used to be possible in 2024, but now even if I set it to “none” I cannot hide Clippy either. Not that I have anything against Clippy but I preferred the cat. I even remember it being possible to have a custom ASCII as the terminal assistant.
Also tangential question but is there an equivalent in Kakoune for Cmd/Option on Mac? On Mac you could do Cmd+Left/Right to move the beginning and end of the line, and Cmd+Backspace will delete an entire line. Similarly, using Option with those keys would also do that but it’s word by word.
I’m not sure of the exact timeline here, but Kakoune used to use the ncurses library for its UI, so to configure the assistant you’d do something like:
set global ui_options ncurses_assistant=cat
At some point mawww wrote his own terminal-handling code that used the terminal_* prefix for keys in ui_options, and then ncurses front-end was dropped, along with the ncurses_* keys. The terminal UI supports most of the same configuration as the old ncurses UI did, but the options have different names, so:
set global ui_options terminal_assistant=cat
…should do what you want. Check out :doc options and search for ui_options for all the available settings.
Kakoune doesn’t have a direct analogue to the traditional Cmd/Option keybindings on the Mac, but there are commands for most of those things:
beginning of line: gh, <a-h>
end of line: gl, <a-l>
delete line: xd
move one word back: b
move one word forward: e (or w, which is slightly different)
For your 2nd question, one of the main point of a modal editor is that you have better ways to do what you describe.
But better is subjective, and you don’t have to submit to kakoune’s default bindings. You can totally create mappings to have exactly the shortcut you described:
map global insert <m-right> gl
To bind meta+right arrow to go to the end of the line.
That’s an idea I’ve seen more than one people dabble with, not counting myself: have vi style binding in normal mode and enrich insert mode with bindings from non modal UI, though it’s usually gnu readline/emacs inspired rather than CUA.
Meta is alt on Windows btw, I have no idea whether cmd is meta or control. I also don’t know what fullname kakoune gave to backspace, but you can record a macro (Q…Q) and paste it ("@p) to see ho to write keys in mapping.
That being said, even if you end up with custom mappings, it’s good practice to learn the defaults, as they also double as the editing language.