If you are wondering why Kakoune and not Vim, the OP claims...
(you find following passages later in his post and they don't reflect my opinion)
> A design goal of Kakoune is to beat vim at its own game, while providing a cleaner editing model.
> Kakoune manages to beat Vim at the keystroke count game in most cases, using much more idiomatic commands.
> Kakoune provides an efficient code editing environment, both very predictible, hence scriptable, and very interactive. Its learning curve is considerably easier than Vim thanks to a more consistent design associated with strong discoverability, while still being faster (as in less keystrokes) in most use cases.
The last one is compelling, but the new "editing language" and paradigm that's been put together is _really_ compelling. Being able to see what a "sentence" is going to do as you're typing it is a huge improvement on vim. I _love_ vim, but executing complex commands is like shouting into a dark tunnel and hoping the person on the other end understands what you were trying to say.
That's why I tend to use visual mode. It sounds like Kakoune is basically visual mode by default, which is cool but not that different.
This example was a bit silly: "dtf will delete to next f, if you then realize that was one f before the one you targeted, you need to undo, go back to your initial position, and try again with d2tf."
There's no need to undo. Just follow up with a dot and you're done. Which pretty much illustrates my other general strategy, which is to edit incrementally without worrying about getting each command perfect.
(Which is not to say I don't find Kakoune intriguing.)
Which is to say that they don't understand vim, or rather, they don't even grok vi.
You can't beat your enemy if you don't understand your enemy.
"Go ahead and down vote more, I just wish you guys can learn more of vi, so you can truly deliver something better. So far, these surface scratching alterations only build on irritations of those vi first-timers. Good luck.
"By the way, I use acme when I have graphics interface, nothing beats sam's structured regexp editing capability, apart from writing perl scripts. Learn something, guys.
Having said that, if you like both vi(m) and the structural regular expression support of sam/acme you might be interested in vis which combines the two: