Two main differences for who comes from vim in my opinion:
1) Editing model based on (multiple) selections. Instead of moving around and issuing verbs on objects, as in vim, you are always selecting something and the command (delete, change, yank and so on) comes afterwards.
It may not seem very different from vim, but the huge advantage is the feedback that you get from the editor.
2) Scripting kakoune is totally different from scripting vim and somewhat harder.
If you need something in vim, you write your vim script and that's it.
You can't do this in kakoune because the editor language is not a programming language, but only allows you to communicate with the system.
This is the reason why POSIX is a hard dependency, every script in kakoune usually relies on POSIX binutils to do things.
I've been learning to use UNIX more since I've started to use kakoune.
1) Editing model based on (multiple) selections. Instead of moving around and issuing verbs on objects, as in vim, you are always selecting something and the command (delete, change, yank and so on) comes afterwards.
It may not seem very different from vim, but the huge advantage is the feedback that you get from the editor.
2) Scripting kakoune is totally different from scripting vim and somewhat harder. If you need something in vim, you write your vim script and that's it. You can't do this in kakoune because the editor language is not a programming language, but only allows you to communicate with the system.
This is the reason why POSIX is a hard dependency, every script in kakoune usually relies on POSIX binutils to do things.
I've been learning to use UNIX more since I've started to use kakoune.