Hi,
For some time I was very annoyed that I need to switch to other editor when for “Edit with…”. Couple weeks later I took Neovide (Neovim’s GUI) as architecture inspiration (i.e. cell rendering through GL) and kak -ui json as backend and went to see how far I can push. Not exactly smoothly but got quite far.
I’m on macOS, so most features are macOS focused (like Menubar integration and file registration) but in general it’s just a terminal Kakoune without terminal.
I don’t plan many features for it outside of being drop-in GUI editor. For eye-candies I’m considering doing smooth scrolling and overlays with shadows, maybe some stuff around line glyph renders.
On usable features side I was thinking about window splits and maybe sending Cmd key as additional binding or Ctrl+Alt+Shift, I’ll see how Kakoune backend reacts, but nothing else.
Main feature is that I can double-click a file and Kakoune appears 
Repo at GH: exlee/kakvide
I screwed up with CI setup, and no releases yet, but artifacts are here for download:
github @ exlee/kakvide/actions/runs/28752325328 (can’t post a link to GH for some reason)