The post was already getting long so I didn't mention this, but I already found an fixed a potential deadlock due to each process not closing the redundant ends of the pipe, which was specifically touted as being a potential cause for freezing. However, someone reported the bug again after that change went out, so there's still SOMETHING else causing it to hang that I haven't tracked down yet.
Apparently I didn't word that section very well, because many people took away this impression. My apologies.
Factorio will continue to support X11 for as long as SDL does, in other words, essentially forever. The only change here is that X11 is no longer required for the game to launch at all. SDL will load whichever video driver is available at runtime, or if you have both, you can choose which one to use in the graphics settings.
Kakoune is gimped by the fact that Mawww had children and cannot dedicate nearly as much time to the project as they had planned to. The idea was to have monthly releases, but that quickly fell by the wayside.
Helix is interesting, and built in LSP and Treesitter is really cool, but it feels like it's missing some of the core principles of orthogonality that Kakoune has. It has the potential to overtake Kakoune very quickly simply due to how active its community is.
Kak is mostly self-documenting, but there are a few :doc pages that give more detail. Of particular interest are the commands [0] and command parsing [1] pages. Those will get you started.
Kakscript does not have any control flow beyond a simple try/catch mechanism - for anything complex, you use shell scripting [2]. It is both a blessing and a curse - making it extremely easy to integrate with other tools, but causing some pain if you don't know shell scripting already.
I've been using Kakoune as my daily driver for almost a year. The thing that made me fall in love was the simplicity, both in daily usage and in extensibility.
The biggest "oh wow" moment for me was how easy it was to create a color scheme. In Vim, creating your own color scheme is potentially a huge ordeal, with many edge cases. For example, vim-one's color scheme file is over 800 lines long.
By contrast, I created a fully functional Kakoune color scheme in only 84 lines, 60 lines if I remove extraneous spacing and comments. There is no conditional logic, no legacy support, just one set of standard "faces" that work everywhere. All languages use the same standard set of faces to do their syntax highlighting. The difference that makes is astounding.
This is but one example of Kakoune's orthogonality and simplicity of design. Coming from Vim, which is chock full of legacy code and an inconsistent mess of configuration, it's a breath of fresh air.
I would have thought that creating/adapting a colour scheme is a onetime activity when you start using the editor for your language. Do you update the colour scheme regularly?
I used color schemes as an example, perhaps it was a bad one. I don't update it regularly, no.
As others have said, the appeal of Kak is orthogonality and accessibility. The keybindings are sensibly organized, there is exhaustive autocomplete and on screen documentation, and the configuration language is simple. It is ridiculously easy to write plugins for, because you can use shell scripting, or create a program in any language you want and invoke it from a shell block. Kakoune's LSP plugin is written in Rust and communicates with Kak via the shell.
Sorry if it looks like I was being flippant. I wasn't. I had some colleagues in the past that did adjust their colour scheme almost monthly. I think it was when syntax highlight first came onto the scene back in the mid 90s.
Oh you're fine! I didn't think you were being flippant. I've been using One Darker (One Dark with a darker background) for two years and don't have any plans to change anytime soon. Here's the source for the theme if you're interested. It has gotten a little bit more complex than I described in my post, due to supporting various plugins, but it's still pretty easy to understand.
