Meet Kakoune, an easy-to-use Vim

Vim is a classic of the Linux world, a very powerful text editor and used by many people around the world, but he, though very good, is not the only option. Disregarding Emacs, Nano, and some others, also very popular, today you will meet the very interesting Kakoune.

Kakoune Kakoune is a Vim-inspired text editor that has similar and more intuitive commands. It has an interactive help system, xclip which is based on the famous Clippy from Microsoft Office and other applications.

Kakoune is in the repository of all Linux distributions and other systems: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, Windows and others. Then to install it is no secret, just run the package manager installation command from your system. Example for Debian, Ubuntu and Mint:

sudo apt install kakoune

Use

As stated above, Kakoune's commands are similar to Vim's. To open or create a file, simply run the command kak file. It has the insert mode (press i key to start typing) and to exit and save (press ESC and then press: wq). If you want to save (ESC): w and if you want to exit without saving (ESC): q!

Setup

To get help from Kakoune, just type the letter 'q' or 'Q' in upper case. Open the helper (Clippy) to give you some tips, see the image below:

Getting Help from Clippy

Kakoune By typing i to type the text: By typing i to type the text I hit ESC and then type: wq

Note that besides Clippy, it now also has a white bar that guides me which commands to use. I could also press the TAB key that Kakoune would navigate these options and write the commands for me, as there is in the image below.

I hit ESC and then type: wq By pressing TAB and navigating the options: By pressing TAB and navigating the options:

Customizing your Kakoune

You can number the lines, change the color theme and among many other shapes. If you press ESC ':' (colon) notice that it already guides you through the commands.

Kakoune

If you want to number the command lines (start typing the command and use TAB to make it easier):

add-highlighter global / number_lines

Kakoune To change the color theme:

colorscheme (theme_who_you_want)

Kakoune And many other commands you might notice yourself from the drop down menu. But when you close Kakoune, these settings will be lost, but you can make these changes permanent by creating a directory named kak inside the .config directory for the reason of its user, see the command:

mkdir -p ~ / .config / kak

And then create a file named kakrc and paste the same commands you used inside the file, like this:

kak .config / kak / kakrc

Hit i to enter insert mode and paste this content into it, assuming you want this theme:

add-highlighter global / number_lines

colorscheme (theme_you_voc_ chose)

Don't forget to save before leaving (ESC): wq or (ESC): write-quit as Kakoune himself suggests.

Okay, now just open Kakoune and the settings will not be lost. The Kakoune configuration reason directory in / usr / share / kak /, inside it has .kak files that are syntaxes for various programming languages ​​and among other files and directories, which is a good idea to analyze.

And speaking of good idea, be sure to check out the official Kakoune wiki at: https://github/mawww/kakoune/wiki which has a lot of great tips and if you want to use a kakrc with several configurations already included, copy of this address:

Abraos!

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