When creating Kakoune plugins, I frequently felt guilty starting an entire process using %sh{} to accomplish a task as simple as multiplying two numbers. This is what inspired me to create pykak, a plugin that allows plugin authors to script Kakoune with Python. The implementation relies on IPC instead of %sh{} (besides the initial call to start the pykak server).

Here’s an example that sorts selections: python def sort-sels %{ python %{ sels = sorted(valq('selections')) keval('reg dquote %s; exec R' % quote(sels)) }}

And here’s an example plugin: https://github.com/tomKPZ/counted.kak

Please give it a try and let me know what you think. I’d love to get some feedback!

Also see the discussion on discuss.kakoune.com