[xlii]

I agree with the premise of the article.

For example I've been using Jujutsu exclusively (as a Git frontend) for years and I don't think about it, I just use it. I reflected on this couple of years. It's existence is completely transparent to me.

I, however, don't agree with sibling commenter that it's a function of time spent with X though. As a counter example: Emacs was my go to editor for 15+ years, last 2 years - because reasons - I was switching between Neovim, Helix, Emacs, Kakoune. 6 months ago I settled with Kakoune.

Even with many years in Emacs, I still tweaked and tuned it. There was always something to do, change, understand. I actively thought about Emacs.

With Kakoune after initial "set me up" phase, it's just as transparent as Jujutsu. Sure, I made complex plugins (for searching, highlighting unbalanced parenthesis and even a GUI wrapper called Kakvide). But the difference is that in Emacs the driver was the tool itself and in Kakoune it's always "I wonder if I can do X".

And so I believe that Kakoune is better tool than Emacs as it's more transparent to me even with a big time difference in usage.

[aquariusDue]

As someone deeply invested in Emacs who had a short fling with Kakoune a few years ago I'm super curious how did you manage the transition? I have lots of notes in org-mode and rely on packages like Magit and so on, due to that I'm always wary of the fact that a lot of my computer use flows through Emacs (for better or worse).

Also one thing that intrigues me about Kakoune is the possibility of writing CLI utils in whatever language and then calling them from Kakoune. The same can be done from Emacs but generally you'd go for Elisp instead.

I've also found I miss fancier text decoration like subscripts, bold, italics, underline and mixing monospace with another font when not using Emacs.

[xlii]

Obviously Kakoune is much simpler than Emacs, so face variability, very interactive UI is not there (though there'd be nothing preventing writing it, but I doubt anyone wants it enough).

As for transition - I always was somewhat of an UNIX guy, so I replaced Swiper/Occur/Consult with delegating to shell. Kakoune has just enough utilities to create a on-keystroke-updated-buffer so I'm happy with that. In some languages I go as much to create "find functions" special mode - composition with shell is easier than Lisp - I rarely have to read documentation.

For Git I use Jujutsu (so I stopped using Magit long time ago) but Kakoune has a very nice "!commmand<ret>" utilities. It's nothing more than a "C-u M-!", but positioning of feature differs.

So the transition is mainly about delegation, not sticking to one application, but instead finding utility that does it and use that instead.

[ncphillips]

jj required a very weird mind shift in how I work, but since it’s clicked I’d never go back. Occasionally it makes easy things a bit awkward, but the amount of hard things it makes easy is incredible. Several patterns of work have become common for me that I would never have done before.