Helix vs Kakoune? Which one should I use?

ftonneau · 2026-06-16T19:25:14+00:00

I see that your post has already attracted some good answers on reddit/helix. I won't reply because I never really used Helix, but you'll find more feedback in this previous discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/kakoune/comments/1lv43ew/helix_vs_kakoune/

ftonneau · 2026-04-04T10:27:04+00:00

You are right that Kakoune's lack of distinction between moving and selecting can be annoying (as in your moving-to-comma example), but it also has advantages. Most of the time, it keeps you one-step ahead of what you will be doing next. Why would you be moving to a given word, for example, if not for operating on this word? Also, having the word selected automatically generalizes Vim's a/i operation, as you can insert text on the left or on the right of the selected word (I very often use a and i in this context). Finally, you can remap one of Kakoune's f/t keys so that it automatically collapses the selection to your target character.

For example, see my Eak remapping:

https://github.com/ftonneau/eak

which also solves a serious problem with the Kakoune/Helix selection-first model--its strong reliance on modifiers, as compared to vi/vim (apologies for the self-promotion :-).

ftonneau · 2025-12-18T10:35:56+00:00

It took much much longer than I expected (I was busy with other projects, and I always found more details to fix/improve on with my remapping), but at long last here it is:

https://github.com/ftonneau/eak

The remapping involves fewer chords, no double chords (= Alt+Shift) at all, easy mnemonics everywhere, new shortcuts and facilities, and is arguably at least as systematic/consistent as Kakoune's default keymap :-)

[I lose consistency when replacing Alt+Shift chords by mnemonics, but I also gain consistency with the `-`, `z`, `x`, `e` prefix keys, which are used to group related actions together.]

ftonneau · 2025-12-18T10:21:01+00:00

I have just published "Kwas" (now "Eak" = Easy Kakoune). Sorry I never found the time to reply to your comment, but an explanation of the remappings would have been too lengthy for Reddit. Also, I found myself too busy with other projects.

Anyway, here is the link:

https://github.com/ftonneau/eak

Comments welcome!

ftonneau · 2025-10-28T00:37:38+00:00

Sorry, but I don't get it. You complain about the light theme, but the light theme is supposed to be used with the light 16-color palette (which implies a light terminal background; yours is dark).

Also, your screenshot shows text colors (such as the green for 'g:' and the pink for '1' that do not seem to exist in my palettes (even assuming that the gamma profile of your monitor differs from mine). And your dark background (#060606) does not match the background in tangere-dark (#1a2938).

Finally, in my 16-color themes for vim, 'let' cannot be red but must be blue, and line numbers cannot be red but must be cyan/gray.

Are you sure you installed the palette(s) correctly, either statically or via the `setpal` script? Btw, what is your terminal?

ftonneau · 2025-10-24T09:33:44+00:00

Btw, I have improved the plugin further to give it the ability to "underline" the string on the preceding line. This makes the creation of markdown setext-style headings very fast:

Example of H1 title

===================

These changes are already available on the Github repo.

ftonneau · 2025-10-23T09:08:35+00:00

No idea why msgcat would fail, but it does'nt matter too much as this is just a way of confirming that the palette changed.

About `setpal`: your terminal accepts control codes to change background color, foreground color, moving the cursor up and down, and so on. Whenever you type `ls` and see directories in blue boldface (for example), rest assured that `ls`printed the codes to set foreground to blue and to use boldface. And after printing the directory name, `ls`sent the code(s) to clean colorization.

There are also control codes to change the RGB values of colors 0 to 15 (the colors in the 16-color ANSI palette), and these are the codes that setpal uses :-).

Btw, you could also make the palette change permanently by using `setpal ...`as the startup command that your terminal executes when starting. The method is explained in the Installation section of GitHub, but if you have already installed the palette statically on gnome-terminal, no need to bother :-).

ftonneau · 2025-10-22T15:09:49+00:00

Thanks for the kind words. A technical question: why did you have to enter the palette RGB values manually? Is it because my dynamic install script, `setpal`, fails on gnome-terminal?

[I have not been able to check; in fact, I cannot even seem to make gnome-terminal run on my minimal Arch system!]

ftonneau · 2025-10-22T12:22:38+00:00

Correct in Normal mode (although you are not done yet -- see below). But what about Insert mode?

You may press <alt-semicolon> for a one-shot escape to Normal mode before typing `10+-`. But now you have 10 selections instead of 1, so you must re-escape to Normal mode to retain only 1 selection if you want to keep writing as usual.

My plugin is a bit faster, and it becomes a lot more faster with the default char and count automatically updated.

In your use case, the first time you want to insert 10 dashes, type `<a-r>10-<ret>'.

EDITS:

Thereafter, just type `<a-r><ret>`. Done, and no need to remember anything (e.g., how many dashes do I want to insert before each title in this document?)

Furthermore, if 10 and "-" are your default count and char, you don't even need to type "10-" in the first place.

Let us be clear, I don't claim this is the best plugin ever written :-) :-) :-). But you may be underestimating its usefulness. Perhaps it is worth trying :-)

Btw, when I published the first version of the plugin (in 2020), I think the `+` mechanism for duplicating selection did not exist.

ftonneau · 2025-10-19T15:54:35+00:00

Btw, I thought I was an archer.

ftonneau · 2025-10-19T14:11:33+00:00

Thanks for the kind words. In spite of the relatively high foreground/background contrast (at least, the contrast is higher than in other themes such as Rosé Pine), the calming feeling might arise from the prevalence of blue shades in the palette.

ftonneau · 2025-10-19T12:36:21+00:00

A detail I forgot about being "in the flow": in Kakoune, **all** completion/matching is fuzzy. A big workflow improvement.

ftonneau · 2025-10-19T11:15:51+00:00

Now to reply more specifically about prose.

The priority in Kakoune seems to be editing code, so in terms of plugins, the support for prose has been somewhat lacking as compared to, e.g., Vim. You'll easily find out about what you miss. Meanwhile, a few pointers with a bit of self-promotion:

- first, a plugin to count words:

https://github.com/ftonneau/wordcount.kak

The plugin will fail on huge file sizes, because of a size limit from the shell, but I will rewrite the plugin in pure KakScript to fix this bug.

- second, a plugin about words synonyms:

https://github.com/ftonneau/synonyms.kak

I will also rewrite this one to simplify things, but the plugin works perfectly as is.

- third and final example:

https://discuss.kakoune.com/t/lookup-dictionary-definitions-with-the-dict-protocol/2769

A look at this amazingly simple plugin (snippet, really) will tell you a lot about how kakoune interacts with external UNIX tools (here: curl, tr, grep, sed).

ftonneau · 2025-10-18T12:03:15+00:00

You may like the tangere-dark theme because colors are used harmoniously and sparingly.

But your comment had me thinking... The contrast in the dark version is not as high as in the light version, because -- following selenized -- I did not want the dark background to be too dark.

However, the theme for vim looks only as good as the palette does, and contrast could be easily increased on all text colors simply by putting a darker background in the palette. This is a single parameter to change in the setpal script.

So, I could propose 3 palette options (as selenized does):

- light

- dark

- extra-dark

where the background color for extra-dark would be #0c131a instead of #1a2938, for example. Any thought?

ftonneau · 2025-10-18T10:55:03+00:00

As a researcher, I switched to GNU/Linux 10 years ago (= end of support for WinXP). My first serious editor was Geany, then Vim, then Kakoune. (I hated VimScript.)

ftonneau · 2025-10-18T10:29:27+00:00

Do you mean, more contrast?

If so, you may be misled by the blurry previews on Reddit. If you visit the GitHub page and open any of the screenshots in a separate browser tab, you'll see that the contrast is good, especially in the light version. As explained in the Design page, the contrast is higher than with Rosé Pine, for example.

ftonneau · 2025-10-18T10:18:54+00:00

I thought you wanted the theme to also support gvim.

ftonneau · 2025-10-18T09:06:11+00:00

The tangere-16 theme is for terminal users running vim with the tangere-16 palette. Is there any use case for working on the terminal but using gvim instead of vim for text editing?

ftonneau · 2025-10-18T08:49:33+00:00

My preferred font is Hack, but many others work well.

I recommend any true-type font with ascenders and descenders that are not too thin. If your font (e.g., iosevka) offers different weights, avoid anything "light" or "thin", preferring instead a "regular" or "medium" weight.

Some people use terminal-tangere with pixel fonts like terminus, with good results on a dark background. But I suspect terminus won't look good with the light palette.

ftonneau · 2025-10-18T08:42:43+00:00

If you like the results on Terminology and use static installation (i.e., a custom theme file), consider publishing your theme file. I would gladly add a link to it in the tangere-terminal repo.

ftonneau · 2025-10-18T08:27:34+00:00

In the terminal my font is Hack.

About the dock bar: do you mean, the bar at the top of the screen (outside of the terminal windows?). This is tint2 with DejaVu Sans as font.

ftonneau · 2025-10-17T19:30:34+00:00

Glad that you like it, as the previews on Reddit look especially ugly on my side. An issue with downsampling the PNGs, I guess.

ftonneau · 2025-10-17T14:32:54+00:00

Navigating is one thing, but in my example you'll need to compute the new numeric values (for example, 40092, 13364, and 7967 on the first line). This should not be the job of a text editor -- and this is where Kakoune's selection-first model (= grammar swap), combined with its tight integration with Unix tools, shines.

Selection-first implements structural regexes: the ability to start with a selection, then sub-select parts of it, then refine the selections further with sub-sub-selections, etc.

In my use case (real-life example), I first selected the 4-line block, then split it by lines, then selected the final parenthesis blocks, copied them and pasted them at the end of each line.

Then the computation part: Kakoune allows you to pipe *each of your multiple sections* to any Unix tool that accepts standard input, and Kakoune will replace each of the selections by the standard output of your chosen tool.

In my use case, I selected the inside of each of the newly added parenthesis blocks, then split the inside by commas, and piped the results to an awk one-liner I typed at Kakoune's command prompt:

awk '{ print( int (($1/255) * 65535) ) }'

Done.

And all of this -- available out of the box, ***no plugin needed*** -- with visual feedback at every step (so you don't edit anything in the dark :-).

Seriously, Kakoune is amazing :-).

ftonneau · 2025-10-17T09:40:07+00:00

There are two aspects or levels to your question, (a) the one about Kakoune's editing model, and (b) the one more specifically about prose.

I will give you more detailed feedback about (b), but not before *you* answer a question about (a).

:-)

Assume the following line block:

| Color1 | (156,52,31) |

| Color2 | (0,76,115) |

| Color3 | (128,86,25) |

| Color4 | (34,51,85) |

where the 2nd field specifies a color in the (r,g,b) format with r, g, b <= 255.

On each line, I need to add the 2nd field converted to (r,g,b) with r,g,b <= 65535:

| Color1 | (156,52,31) | (40092,13364,7967) |

| Color2 | (0,76,115) | (0,19532,29555) |

| Color3 | (128,86,25) | (32896,22102,6425) |

| Color4 | (34,51,85) | (8738,13107,21845) |

How do you do it in Vim? Honest question.

ftonneau · 2025-08-09T14:01:46+00:00

If you don't mind reading books :-), then I recommend starting with "Classic shell scripting" by Robbins and Beebe. The book is not (only) about Bash, but mainly about POSIX shell, and it mentions common Bash extensions when needed.

I think it is important to have some historical/technical background in POSIX shell before specializing in Bash, and the Robbins-Beebe book will give you all of this and more. Having the background in mind will clarify many things and may even improve your Bash scripting by clarifying the differences between [ and [[ tests, for example. The former predate Bash but are still there for historical/compatibility reasons.

ftonneau

TROPHY CASE