How to pronounce the name of the project and what does it mean ?
The name of the project is pronounced “Kak-oon”, and is a word taken
from a New Caledonian dialect based on french. It means a hard blow,
usually a punch, but generally refers to a blow into which all of one’s
strength went.
Is there going to be a Windows port of Kakoune ?
As many features provided by UNIX systems would be missing, or if
anything much less efficient on a Windows system, the incentive to
porting the project to this operating system is pretty low.
Moreover, you can get pretty decent performance by using Kakoune on
Cygwin (which is officially supported).
Kakoune is very slow on big files, what can I do about it ?
The default build mode (set in the Makefile of the src directory of
the project) is “debug”, which makes it convenient to track issues but
also affects performance. To disable the debug mode, recompile the
project by setting the debug variable in src/Makefile to no.
Note that if your distribution provides a “kakoune” package, the program
should already be built in non-debug mode (if you still experience
slowness, please report the issue on the bug tracker).
Can I use Kakoune as a pager ?
Kakoune can be used as a pager, either by setting the PAGER
environment variable to kak, or by writing data directly to its
standard input using a shell pipeline.
Are there any non-console based frontends available ?
No graphical frontend is currently officially maintained, you can
however try experimental community-developed ones.
Why are colors misrendered in my Kakoune clients ?
The most probable cause for that is a very widespread practice that
consists in setting the TERM environment variable in the shell’s
configuration file. This variable should be set by the terminal
emulator, and not overridden with an arbitrary value, otherwise it might
interfere with general UI rendering on the terminal’s window.
I’m using tmux and colors look weird
If you’re using a tool that doesn’t support “palette switching”, colors
will still be slightly off: they are being rounded down to values
supported by the regular color palette by Kakoune. Fortunately, on
recent versions of tmux (>=2.6), you can work around that by using
the following configuration settings:
~/.tmux.conf.
set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color"
set -ga terminal-overrides ",*col*:Tc"
Note: \*col* is a regular expression that matches your terminal’s
$TERM value, modify it if necessary, e.g. xterm-termite.
Next, run the following command to create a local terminfo override:
$ tic /path/to/kakoune/contrib/tmux-256color.terminfo
Finally, quit all existing sessions (tmux kill-server), and restart
tmux.
Why does leaving insert mode take more than half a second in tmux ?
Upon hitting the escape key, tmux waits for a short period of time to
determine whether it’s part of a function or a meta key sequence. In
order to fix this “lag”, set the waiting period in your tmux
configuration file to a short time, e.g. 25ms: set -sg escape-time 25
How do I automatically indent code, as Vim does with = ?
As Kakoune doesn’t parse the contents of the buffers, there is no
builtin equivalent for this Vim feature. Use a formatter/prettifier
dedicated to the language you’re using with the help of the | key.
Example: %|indent<ret> to indent an entire buffer with C code.
Note that some languages have a default formatter set, which you can use
with the :format command.
Can Kakoune automatically complete the parameters of my functions ?
As mentioned in the above question about Vim’s = key, Kakoune does not
parse the contents of a buffer by itself, which makes it impossible for
the editor to propose candidates upon completion.
However, support for such a feature can be achieved through the use of a
dedicated tool, as is the case with clang and C code: you can use the
clang-enable-autocomplete and clang-complete builtin commands
whenever editing a C/C++ file, and completion will work on function
parameters.
Note that the same features are available for python buffers, with the
jedi script.
Why aren’t widely known command line shortcuts such as <c-w> or <c-u> available in Kakoune ?
Despite their widespread availability in multiple tools, those shortcuts
do not fit the paradigm that Kakoune implements, which is based on
selections first.
However, you can easily declare key mappings in your configuration file
to be able to use those control-based shortcuts in insert mode. (See
:doc mapping)
How can I explore the filesystem the way Vim’s NerdTree does ?
The builtin file completion engine used when opening a file for editing
(using the :edit command and letting the suggestions popup in the menu
beneath) is much more convenient than Vim’s, which should suit basic
needs.
However, if you need an actual explorer to interact with the editor, you
can create a Kakoune script that will spawn the tool in question, which
should in return send an “edit” command followed by the path of the file
you selected to the current Kakoune session (e.g. echo "eval -client $kak_client edit /path/to/file" | kak -p $kak_session).
Why aren’t there other scopes similar to %sh{} e.g. python ?
Supporting custom scopes would add hard dependencies to the project,
which is too much of a drawback when balanced against the low cost of
using an interpreter in a regular shell scope (e.g.
%sh{ python -c "..." }). The shell scope allows users to spawn any
interpreter they want, for a minimal cost in terms of performance, it is
therefore the reason why it’s the only one available by default.
What shell is used to expand %sh{} scopes ?
The server expands shell scopes using the sh binary, stored in one of
the directories where all the POSIX standard utilities can be found
-this list of directories is stored in a system configuration variable,
and queried by Kakoune at startup.
In most distributions, /bin/sh will end up being used.
Can I disable auto-indentation completely ?
All the indentation hooks are conventionally named <lang>-indent,
which allows us to use the disabled_hooks variable to disable
indentation globally with the following command:
set global disabled_hooks '.+-indent'
How to enable syntax highlighting ?
The mimetype of the files opened in new buffers is detected using the
file command, and syntax highlighting enabled automatically when
possible.
My file seems to be highlighted with the wrong colors, I thought syntax highlighting was detected automatically ?
The file utility has several short comings, such as detecting the
wrong mimetype for a file containing data with different syntax, e.g. a
Python script containing hardcoded HTML templates detected as an HTML
file.
Kakoune does its best at detecting file types (using known extensions
for a given format for instance), but not much can be done about those
ambiguous cases. You might consider writing a custom $HOME/.magic file
if needed.
Can I disable syntax highlighting completely ?
Similarly to the indentation hooks, the name format followed by the
highlighting hooks is <lang>-highlight. You can thus disable syntax
highlighting using the following command: set global disabled_hooks '.+-highlight'
Why does a dot . in a regex select newline characters ?
Data in buffers is a stream of characters, and newlines do not receive
special treatment compared to other characters, with regards to regex
matching. In order to select data in a line without any trailing newline
characters, one could use the [^\n]+ pattern, which is arguably a good
compromise when balanced against the ability to select data over several
lines.
Can I split the window to display different buffers in them ?
As a fairly compliant follower of the UNIX philosophy, Kakoune does not
try to implement features that are best handled by separate, dedicated
tools. Windows splitting in terminals is a prime example of that
concept, where the editor provides commands to interact with several
terminal multiplexers (e.g. tmux), as opposed to emulating their
functionalities.
In order to open buffers in the same window simultaneously using tmux
(or one of the supported multiplexers), run Kakoune in a tmux session,
and simply use the :new command to spawn new clients as you would have
otherwise in an X11 environment.
Why does a extend the current selection, but i leaves it untouched ?
Selections are ranges of characters whose delimiters are an “anchor” and
a “cursor”, and inserting characters is always done before the cursor in
insert mode.
Consequently, using the append primitive (a) nudges the cursor forward
to make room for characters, effectively extending the current selection
since the anchor remains immobile, even when the anchor and the cursor
are at the same location. By opposition, using the insert primitive
(i) merely adds characters before the cursor, which never modifies the
current selection.