<story><title>Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor</title><url>http://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wangchow</author><text>In this age we need to think about things like voice control and 3D manipulation of data-structures and a dynamic view of the code.&lt;p&gt;We can truthfully keep designing 2D editors (and we will always most likely use them to some extent) but I believe it is more important to consider different UI paradigms altogether.&lt;p&gt;For instance, what about editing a living code environment? Game development is very immersive: you can manipulate a running environment and see results immediately. How can this be extended to other development tasks like server-side development?&lt;p&gt;What if, when you select a for loop from code fragment a 3D visualization of the programs data structures at that point is shown to the user. What if you can, instead of launching a debugger, run the debugger as you&amp;#x27;re writing the code and step forward and back and see these visualizations change?&lt;p&gt;We have all the technology. It&amp;#x27;s time to get to the next level.</text></item><item><author>greenspot</author><text>If you are wondering why Kakoune and not Vim, the OP claims...&lt;p&gt;(you find following passages later in his post and they don&amp;#x27;t reflect my opinion)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; A design goal of Kakoune is to beat vim at its own game, while providing a cleaner editing model.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Kakoune manages to beat Vim at the keystroke count game in most cases, using much more idiomatic commands.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Kakoune provides an efficient code editing environment, both very predictible, hence scriptable, and very interactive. Its learning curve is considerably easier than Vim thanks to a more consistent design associated with strong discoverability, while still being faster (as in less keystrokes) in most use cases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mncharity</author><text>Yes, but.  Keep ripeness in mind.  It&amp;#x27;s very easy to spend effort in this area &amp;quot;too soon&amp;quot;.  So shape projects with care.&lt;p&gt;I run a Vive on linux.  Which required my own stack.  Which took excessive time, and is limiting, but has some road-less-traveled benefit of altered constraints.  So I&amp;#x27;ve gone to talks, and done dev, wearing Vive with video passthrough-AR, with emacs and RDP, driven by an old laptop&amp;#x27;s integrated graphics.  Yay.  But think 1980&amp;#x27;s green CRT (on pentile, green is higher res).  In retrospect, it was a sunk-cost project-management garden path.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s been a lot of that.  One theme of the last few years, has been people putting a lot of effort and creativity into solutions to VR tech constraints, only to have the constraints disappear on a time scale that has them wishing they had just waited, and used the time to work on something else.  It&amp;#x27;s fine for patent trolls (do something useless to plunder future value), and somewhat ok for academics (create interesting toy), but otherwise a cause for caution.&lt;p&gt;So on the one hand, I suggest that if the center tenth of VR displays had twice their current resolution, everything else being current tech, we would already be starting on a &amp;quot;I can have so many screens! And they&amp;#x27;re 3D! And...&amp;quot; disruption in software development tooling.  But that&amp;#x27;s still a year or two out.  Pessimistically, perhaps even more, if VR market growth is slow.&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, what?  Anything where the UI isn&amp;#x27;t the only bottleneck (work on the others).  Or which can work in 2D, or in 3D-on-2D screen (prototype on multiple screens).  Or is VR, but is resolution insensitive, and doesn&amp;#x27;t require a lot of &amp;quot;if I had waited 6 months, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have had to roll my own&amp;quot; infrastructure.  Or which sets you up interestingly for the transition (picture kite.com, not as a 2D sidebar, but generating part of your 3D environment).  Or which can be interestingly demo spiked (for fun mostly?).&lt;p&gt;For example, I would love to be working on VR visual programming on top of a category theoretic type system.  But there seems no part of that which isn&amp;#x27;t best left at least another year to ripen. Though maybe 2D interactive string diagrams might be a fun spike.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor</title><url>http://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wangchow</author><text>In this age we need to think about things like voice control and 3D manipulation of data-structures and a dynamic view of the code.&lt;p&gt;We can truthfully keep designing 2D editors (and we will always most likely use them to some extent) but I believe it is more important to consider different UI paradigms altogether.&lt;p&gt;For instance, what about editing a living code environment? Game development is very immersive: you can manipulate a running environment and see results immediately. How can this be extended to other development tasks like server-side development?&lt;p&gt;What if, when you select a for loop from code fragment a 3D visualization of the programs data structures at that point is shown to the user. What if you can, instead of launching a debugger, run the debugger as you&amp;#x27;re writing the code and step forward and back and see these visualizations change?&lt;p&gt;We have all the technology. It&amp;#x27;s time to get to the next level.</text></item><item><author>greenspot</author><text>If you are wondering why Kakoune and not Vim, the OP claims...&lt;p&gt;(you find following passages later in his post and they don&amp;#x27;t reflect my opinion)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; A design goal of Kakoune is to beat vim at its own game, while providing a cleaner editing model.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Kakoune manages to beat Vim at the keystroke count game in most cases, using much more idiomatic commands.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Kakoune provides an efficient code editing environment, both very predictible, hence scriptable, and very interactive. Its learning curve is considerably easier than Vim thanks to a more consistent design associated with strong discoverability, while still being faster (as in less keystrokes) in most use cases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>azeirah</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;Azeirah&amp;#x2F;A-new-wave-of-programming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;Azeirah&amp;#x2F;A-new-wave-of-programming&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>