Is there anything that you would remove from Kakoune?

Strange question because we (myself included) always ask for moooaarr!

mawww tries its best to avoid feature creep to bloat the core of the editor.
But do you feel that they are a few things that should not be there? Reasons could be because it is better handled by another tool or because it does not integrate well etc…

In my opinion Kakoune already extremely minimalist. So focus should go on improving editor core features, like indentation handling for example. It is total mess compared to Vim.

Well, maybe syntax highlighting should be not thrown away, but externalized so it could be done by faster tools, with semantic support like clang or cquery does. I don’t know, maybe current implementation handles this.

I’ve thought of a couple things. The only one I remember at the moment is that the colon prompt could be handled by fzf or fzy. Perhaps highlighting could be a separate program or programs?

I don’t have some specific stuff on the top of my mind but I think I want kakoune to be a bit more minimalist. I know is not like vim with the feature creep but I like extreme minimalist stuff. To be honest, this is not a real worry because I think this kakoune is great as is, but at the same time, is not vis level of minimalism and makes me a bit uncomfortable to put it on servers.

I think I would remove some of the bundled .kak files, there is some questionable bloat in rc/extra, and the startup time is already too high on a default installation for my taste. But it’s not super harmful considering that you can just load what you want.

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The only one I remember at the moment is that the colon prompt could be handled by fzf or fzy

no, please no.

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I think this over time will become part of LSP (Proposal for (Semantic) Coloring (see #18) by svenefftinge · Pull Request #124 · microsoft/language-server-protocol · GitHub) – and I look forward to it. I guess Kakoune could try to get ahead of the curve on it a bit.

EDIT: (better link) Semantic highlighting protocol extension · Issue #368 · microsoft/vscode-languageserver-node · GitHub

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Aren’t some servers already provide highlighting? I know that cquery does.

I hope external highlighting won’t entirely replace builtin highlighters. Sure, regexes are often worse solution than proper lexer but they allow to create syntax highlighting fast.

sure it wont. I just think that if external solution for this task can be more performant it should handle this task instead of builtin solution, but not replace builtin entirely

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