Kakoune

Raised as a usability problem by 20 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2015–2025), in 15 threads.

People raised many different problems with Kakoune, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 29 complaints

Editor's LSP hover UI is bad and scripting it is too complicated2025-10-10
Leaves extra cursors behind while jumping around, which gets in the way of ordinary single edits2025-10-10
Slow to load and lags for a second on line edits in 100MB files2025-05-20
Editor stays in a pending state after motions, leaving users surprised by unexpected changes2025-04-24
Delegating splits and tabs to the terminal makes window management annoying for users2023-09-21
Deleting a line with x then d removes the next line when on a blank line2023-09-15
Must manually prune cursors before substituting, adding steps the user doesn't want2023-06-21
Movements like search leave extra cursors that need an extra keystroke to dismiss2023-06-21
Splitting windows and hopping between them feels hacky and awkward2023-06-21
Gets basic vim keys like dd and V wrong when switching between editors2022-04-15
Easy to write shell config scripts that break on other systems or make the editor unlaunchable2022-01-18
Couldn't find documentation listing the modal commands in editor or website2022-01-18
Couldn't figure out how to disable help popups or hide line numbers2022-01-18
Cannot delete three words directly; "3wd" jumps to the third word instead, which is slower and frustrating2022-01-18
No select mode means text is selected constantly while moving, and few keys remain free2021-05-26
Simple single-line edits become harder because movement creates multiple cursors and selections2021-03-02
Multi-select causes confusion and users struggle to exit that mode2021-03-02
X and X behave infuriatingly on empty lines, so the commenter forked the editor to fix it2020-10-06
Plugin API is keystroke based, which the author finds pointless and inconvenient2019-08-04
Line deletion behaves unexpectedly on empty lines, deleting the next line instead of the current one2019-03-05
Hard to express growing a selection upward after selecting downward2019-03-05
Relies on the shell for idiomatic plugins, which the commenter dislikes2019-03-05
Must remember to hold J to grow selection; one wrong key loses the selection2019-03-05
Works less well for interactive global regex replacement than Vim does2019-03-05
Couldn't figure out how to reduce multiple cursors back to one; found it by accident2016-12-14
Hard to find the link to get Kakoune on the home page2016-12-13
Users must memorize many key combinations and track current mode2016-12-13
Reading area is tiny on mobile because a static menu takes over half the screen2015-11-01
Many settings are hardcoded with no way to change them, even via commands2015-11-01