It's Vim, but good. Memory footprint is basically the same (~8MB on my system) and has advantages: 1. You shell out for everything. Instead of having a shitty configuration language like elisp or that awful bullshit vim has, you basically just map keys to shell functions, and whatever it echos will be inserted into the buffer. I mean, imagine your text editor having to stall to *garbage collect*, ffs. After ditching emacs, I rewrote the shit I had written in elisp as discrete tools, which work generically no matter what editor happens to call them. I'll never be locked into an editor in the same way again. 2. Multiple cursors. If you don't understand what this means, learn why it's the best thing ever: https://github.com/mawww/golf But basically, anything you would normally need macros for, you can do by selecting a region of text, and selecting a set of cursors, each of which will multiply your keystrokes so that you never have to do any kind of repetitive, braindead editing ever again. The level of cleverness that this feature opens is incredible, and it's really more powerful and easier to use than macros. 3. It has no concept of tabs, frames, or windows. You can run kak as a server and have client terminals connect to it and they'll share the same set of buffers, but there's no code wasted on splitting windows, because that's what a window manager is for, or I guess tmux. 4. It has vim-style keys, but they're more efficient. 5. It has autocomplete and fuzzy-matching fuckin everywhere. In emacs you had to install helm or ivy or whatever, and it was just layer upon layer of bloated garbage that would break down when you try to update them. There will literally never be a better editor than this, ever.