Now the conversion is done.
I’ve used vim for 6 years, and I was kinda skeptic that something will ever make me turn from it. But I’ve found Kakoune somewhere around June this year, and was blown away with how amazing multiple cursor implementation is. Everything else was pretty the same at the first sight. I’ve marked it as an interesting project in my secret list of interested projects, and went back to using Vim since I needed to get work done. At some point I was dissatisfied with the implementation of some features in Vim, like snippets – UltiSnips was extremely slow for me, SnipMate required two separate plugins + snippet collection which is poor, compared to UltiSnips’s one, and other plugins were even poorer in terms of features. So I’ve started developing my own snippet manager for Vim, with features that I need and the speed that I want. But I was still dissatisfied with a lot of other features in Vim, and even more than that, I was bothered that both Vim and NeoVim exists, that a pretty much the same editors, but those two have different bags, and performance hiccups in different places. I’ve started to think about an alternative and remembered about Kakoune. So I’ve started using it alongside with Vim, and after two days I’ve noticed that I’m mistyping a lot of commands in Vim, because of inverted command paradigm in Kakoune. And I’ve thought: “If I’m doing so many mistakes in Vim’s commands, that I’ve flawlessly executed for last 5 years, maybe something wrong about Vim and I should step away to another editor”. So I’ve tried Vis. But it is too minimalist for my taste, so I’ve tried Emacs.
Emacs? Yes. Emacs. So at this point of time I’ve used and configured three editors at once - Vim for most of the work, Kakoune for experimenting, and Emacs as a tool that I maybe will use for next 5 years. It was kinda mess. But It turned out that Emacs wasn’t capable of doing anything that I do at work so I’ve dropped it after 20 days or so. And Now I’ve finally dropped Vim. Kakoune is just amazing editor, that really suits my needs (I hope some plugins will show up), and I can extend it fairly easy. I’ve already written plugin manager and fzf integration, and I believe more to come.
When the firs iPhone was released, I remember how Steve said, that he showed early prototype to someone at Apple, and after the presentation he asked “What do you think?”, and the guy answered “You had me at scrolling”.
So by this post I really wanted to thank everybody involved at making Kakoune a great editor. You had me at multiple cursors.