Kakoune – A Modal Text Editor
I like that there&#x27;s a push now for these reconsiderings of older systems that are still in common use.  Vi&#x2F;vim has been around forever, and has survived all sorts of other editors emerging as competitors.<p>Kakoune is an interesting concept because most post-vi editors have abandoned modality, and Kakoune embraces it wholeheartedly in an attempt to capture the essence of what makes vi powerful and attractive for a certain type of user, but trying to ditch some of the historical ed&#x2F;ex syntax and thought patterns that make vi weirdly inconsistent.  I don&#x27;t think kakoune is quite there -- I think the multi-selection gimmick is not strong enough to be worth being first-class (especially the way that search-and-replace works), too many common operations are chorded, and there&#x27;s no selection &quot;mode&quot; -- you have to remember to keep pressing &#x27;J&#x27; as long as you want to grow the selection; one &#x27;j&#x27; and you&#x27;re lost.<p>In programming languages I think we&#x27;re seeing this happening also; C has remained a prominent language despite its age and the number of C-killers that have emerged over the years, and now we&#x27;re seeing a resurgence of projects that are really trying to preserve something at the heart of C that has made it attractive for so long, but that even the most jaded systems programmer can see are not ideal, like the fact that types precede names in variable declarations, or the lack of a keyword for function or variable declaration that make it hard to grep, or the superfluous parens in ifs and fors that are obviated by mandatory blocks, or the default pass-through behavior in switch statements.  Previous attempts, like C++ and D, have diverged too much from the simplicity of &quot;I can imagine what the assembly code for this function will look like based on the compiler in my head&quot;, Rust has some attraction, but nim and zig and Jai and v are all emerging to nuzzle into that niche by restricting their feature set.