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Do you find the temptation of the plugins to strong to resist? Plain vim doesn't seem much more bloated than in the past.

How is kakoune in practice? I've been eyeing it as well but was waiting for it to mature a bit.



> Do you find the temptation of the plugins to strong to resist?

In a sense... I kept seeing vim plugins promoted as a way to make my life more awesome, but every time I tried one it was incredibly slow and I bounced back to vanilla vim. Not only that, but I kept getting burned every time I would try what seemed like simple customizations, like adding a few extra pieces of information to the status bar. After the Nth time I went to open a 50M file and had vim lock up on me, I reverted my .vimrc.

> Plain vim doesn't seem much more bloated than in the past.

It's not, and to be fair to vim you can build a pretty lean version of it if you want to. But the fact that all of the creaky vimscript machinery is there behind the scenes was starting to bother me.

That alone wouldn't have been enough to bounce me to kak, but when I tried it, it immediately overwrote 20 years of vim muscle memory and I had a lot of trouble switching back. I had been using visual mode a lot in vim, and I always felt a little bad about it -- like if I'd been better at ex I wouldn't have had to use visual mode as much. Kak's editing paradigm is all about selections anyway, so I'm a lot more comfortable using it than I ever was with vim.

> How is kakoune in practice? I've been eyeing it as well but was waiting for it to mature a bit.

It's mature enough for me -- I've been building it from master every couple of days, and crashes are very unusual. The tmux integration is amazing. I always hated having vim splits inside of tmux panes inside of i3 windows, and now I don't.




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