I've switch from years of Vim to years of Kakoune and am now trying Helix. While annoying I find I pick up the right keys fairly quick. A week until I get decent productivity back and a couple of months tops to truly get the hang of it.

I find it immensely helpful that Kakoune and Helix _make sense_. It is also a great boon that there's visual feedback.

Seconding this. I had used Vim for nearly 8 years and felt very comfortable with all the crazy tricks you could do with modal editing but I genuinely felt Kakoune's way of doing modal editing was an improvement so I committed to learning it and it took maybe a month to get comfortable with the new way of editing. I'm really glad I took the plunge because I'm a really happy Kakoune user and I can't think of anything that I miss from Vim.

How does it improve on neovim? Seems to me like slightly different keybindings to do the exact same thing, you're not saving any keystrokes or fatigue as far as I can tell.

It switches from "action selection" to "selection action" which allows you to first select the thing you want to operate on and only then specify what you want do with it. So for example in Vim you may accidentally select too many characters to delete and then you need to redo the command whereas in Kakoune you can adjust the selection before executing the action.

I think one of the best things Kakoune has to offer is that selection mode (visual mode in Vim) is always accessible through <shift><movement> so if I want to select some random number of characters going left, I'll just hold L, or if I want to select all characters until the end of line I'll just press GL whereas gl takes me to the end of line. It makes it so easy to select text.

Finally multicursor, it's so good. I've used Kakoune for over a year now and I haven't had need for macros except for maybe 2 times. I didn't know I needed a multicursor before I had tried Kakoune and I would highly suggest anyone to try Kakoune just for the multicursor experience. It allows you to select a pattern using regex and then operate on the matches simultaneous. Kind of like Vim's "visual block" but on steroids.

selection action is already possible in vim using 'v' or 'V'. But many times, I do want immediate action-operator when I know exactly what I need to operate on. So Kakoune is un-convincing.

>But many times, I do want immediate action-operator when I know exactly what I need to operate on.

This argument doesn't make sense, it's just as fast to type in Kakoune. The order is just different but it makes it possible for you to adjust it when you've either made a mistake or don't exactly know what kind of selection you want.

I know the visual mode in Vim exists under 'v' but the point I was making was that in Kakoune it's more handy and I use it constantly because it's so available, just hold Shift key as oppose typing another letter to enter it. I know it sounds insignificant but I find myself using the visual mode all the time in Kakoune whereas I barely used it in Vim because of that tiny extra effort to enter the mode.

This how I feel about vim too. I’m sure there are editors I would like more but I work on remote servers every day, some of them lightweight, and vim is already going to be on all 500+ of them as part of the OS install.