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# Kakoune

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Related articles

- Helix
- Vim
- List of applications/Documents#Vi-style text editors

Kakoune is a modal text editor. It is inspired by Vim and similar alternatives, but tries to improve the text editing workflow as well as fit better to the Unix philosophy. Besides modal editing, two other main concepts are selection based editing, and multi-cursor editing. It has an interactive help system, and supports many languages. Kakoune inspired editors like Helix.

## Installation

Install the kakoune package.

## Usage

`:doc <topic>` opens the documentation of <topic>.

It has an interactive help system, which means e.g. pressing `g` `(goto mode)` shows a dialog with possible keys and destinations, or it displays a help dialog with the description of the highlighted completion candidate in `prompt` mode.

## Configuration

Kakoune reads configuration from `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kak/`.

The main configuration file is `kakrc`, and custom colorschemes can be stored in the `colors` directory.

Every `*.kak` file is loaded from `autoload` at startup. If this directory exists in `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME`, Kakoune does not load the system wide `autoload` dir (located at `/usr/share/kak/autoload`), so it has to be linked there. For example:

    $ ln -s /usr/share/kak/autoload $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kak/autoload/default

## See also

- Official website
- GitHub repository
- GitHub wiki

Categories:

- Text editors
- Console applications

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