kakoune.el

A very simple simulation of the kakoune editor inside of emacs.

Developer Tools Science & Engineering

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

3Distinct people

4Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

169GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A very simple simulation of the kakoune editor inside of emacs.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

meow-edit/meow · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-08-06 02:41:51 UTC to 2024-03-30 19:26:36 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

4 sources

e12e·Mar 30, 2024

Thanks for the tip, meow looks interesting. I never got comfortable in evil-mode, but perhaps meow could be a gateway to trying emacs in anger. Still waiting for kakoune/helix mode for gnu readline... https://github.com/meow-edit/meow https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el

In Helix: Release 24.03 Highlights

josephferano·Jan 8, 2023

To build on what others are saying about Emacs, if you start exploring the package ecosystem, you're going to see quite a lot of really interesting packages that are related to improving/experimenting with the UX of editing text. While I'm not endorsing anyone in particular, I think what this list does show is just how easy it is to do pretty much whatever you want in Emacs; https://karthinks.com/software/avy-can-do-anything/ https://github.com/jyp/boon https://github.com/clemera/objed https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el https://github.com/meow-edit/meow/ https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys https://github.com/Kungsgeten/ryo-modal https://github.com/emacsorphanage/god-mode Emacs 29 also now has treesitter and LSP mode integration built-in, a compilation mode, a comint mode for REPLs, excellent file browsing packages (I use dired/dirvis

Read the rest

h), and a few other killer features. Now, if what you truly dislike are "quirky editors", prepare yourself for a world of hurt because vanilla Emacs departs quite a bit from "modern" text editors. I struggled with this for a while, but eventually by buying into the paradigm, I now feel that when emacs tries emulating "modern" IDE features like autocompletion, LSP, and DAP UI, I feel like it's a regression, not a progression. The point here is that you might have an "idea" of what good initial UX and lack of quirks would look like, but Emacs might change the way you think.

In Ask HN: Best way to experiment with text text editing?

NateEag·Jan 18, 2022

Note the existence of kakoune.el, an emacs emulation of Kakoune's core: https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el I have no idea how well it reproduces the experience - I'll probably be using vim on servers and emacs evil-mode locally until the day I die, so I haven't bothered to get into Kakoune, awesome though it seems.

In Kakoune Code Editor

NateEag·Aug 6, 2020

Yup, Kakoune was it. Thanks! Edit: And, as had to be the case, someone has made a simple simulation of Kakoune for Emacs: https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el

In Why Should You Learn Vim in 2020