I am using it daily, as my sole editor, for a little more than a year now. Before that I used Neovim. Most important reasons for the switch are:
* Leaves window management to the window manager, so it works much better with a tiling wm. I wish all applications did this.
* Selecting first and then specifying an action works way better than the other way around, as it is done in the Vim family.
Edit: regarding the comments and Vim's visual mode, you are right. I like to change my second bullet to "Does not have too many modes, like the Vim family."
> * Selecting first and then specifying an action works way better than the other way around, as it is done in the Vim family.
There is visual mode in vim too you know. That's for doing exactly what you describe. I use that when I'm unsure about the movement I need for an action.
That's exactly what I used to say before I tried kak. I had been using vim for about 6 years and thought it sounded like vim with multi select and wasn't impressed.
The reality is, you change the way you think about editing. It took about a week away from vim but eventually I could see the selections in realtime. Not as a gimmick like with multicursor vim, but as the basis of everything. I have been using it exclusively for 2 years and haven't looked back once. Single-cursor editing is about the same speed, but selection oriented editing blows vim out of the water with anything with 2 or more edits.
It's like if a notepad user said "what's the point of vim? I can just use a mouse and arrow keys??" Vim changes the way you see things - you see a space separated word so you use W or a line with whitespace at the beginning so you use I. It's hard to explain other than you change your understanding of editing.
Edit: that gimmick comment might annoy some people. I used to use it and love it. But the reality is, it was just an add-on to an already-grest editor. After my plugin phase of vim, I realised it didn't really add much at all. So 'gimmick' is probably too harsh
Vim has all the tools necessary to achieve the same end result with the same convenience. [0]
Just thinking about what crazy things I've done with macros that multi-cursor would be incapable of handling makes me chuckle.
vim doesn't need the fancy features of other editors (except for maybe LSP and tree-sitter for a more IDE-like experience).
The core problem is that you don't grok vi [1] which is fine, not everyone has time and passion for that. But please don't think for a moment that vim is inferior just because it doesn't blindly copy other editors features.
Judging by https://github.com/mawww/golf kakoune is capable of completing the majority of the same editing tasks as vim in a very similar amount of keystrokes. The main advantage of multiple selections is that you can see which text you will operate on ahead of time, rather than having to first select which operation you want (delete/yank/change/etc) and then which text it will affect. I think pointing out that vim's selections aren't as capable as kakoune's is a fair response, and saying that you can accomplish similar things without selections is a bit of a deflection.
Golfing is not the best representation of day to day text editing, but I must say that optimal Kakoune solutions are usually pretty close to normal workflow.
Vim allows me the exact same thing using visual mode. even better, I can still use the powerful move commands in visual mode to control what is selected, before triggering an action on the selection.
* Leaves window management to the window manager, so it works much better with a tiling wm. I wish all applications did this.
* Selecting first and then specifying an action works way better than the other way around, as it is done in the Vim family.
Edit: regarding the comments and Vim's visual mode, you are right. I like to change my second bullet to "Does not have too many modes, like the Vim family."