Kakoune (dpc's fork)

kakoune-dpc is my personal fork of Kakoune.

Most probably you want to go to the original project:

• http://kakoune.org
• https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/

Please open issues only related to the forked part.

Why fork?

I really enjoy Kakoune, I invested quite a bit of time to switch to it and get use to it. It gets a lot of stuff right.

But I can't stand the way x/X keys work! They work consistently in theory, but inconsitently in practice.

The room of the problem is that Kakoune can not make a distinction between an empty line, and fully selected line. So if you want to eg. delete a current line, you have to pay attention if it's empty or not. Which is driving me crazy!

The way I see it, Kakoune prides itself in stuff like VimGolf, but in my opinion it doesn't matter how many keystrokes do you need to get something done, only how quickly can you type them with confidence and without mistakes!

Visual selection of Kakoune improves everything most of the time, but behavior of x is screwing everything up, because you have to constantly look at content of the buffer to do things as simple as reliably selecte a line. You loose your speed, so what's the point? In Vim you could at least reliably push dd and be done with it.

typing without looking (this fork) > visual feedback (original Kakoune) > no feedback (Vim)

Helpful Kakoune community ofered mostly band-aids of eg. using <a-x>, which in my opinion are unsatisfying. If I wanted to push alt and control all the time, I would be using Emacs. 😂

That's why I took a liberty given by Open Source, and the fact that Kakoune codebase is nice and easy to understand, forked and changed the behavior of x-and alikes. Now pressing x/X the first time always selects the current line, and only selects next line when pressed consecutively.

You can look for more details here:

• Discussion: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/issues/2590
• PR: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/pull/2595

Demo

Watch the recording:

https://asciinema.org/a/213671

Details

I've split my changes into following branches:

• line_editing - this branch changes x and X to work in a predictable fashion, by tracking if they were pressed consecutively.
• line_editing_with_highlight - the above plus a visual feedback
• line_editing_ext - all the above plus <a-x>, <a-X> and J, K, L, H were changed to act a bit differently, basically introducing a full-featured "line selection sub-mode"
• master - like line_editing_ext plus branding to explain this is a fork

You can read the commit log for a better idea what each change does exactly.

What about misbehaving plugins

If it becomes a problem, please report it, and I'll introduce a fix so that "line editing sub-mode" behavior changes happen only when typing interactively from the terminal. This way plugins can depend on the original behavior, and users can have the candy.