Readline-style mappings for Kakoune

This plugin implements many line-editing shortcuts in Kakoune, emulating Readline as closely as possible. See the readline(1) man page for explanations of what they do.

Installation

Using plug.kak

Suggested configuration:

# ~/.config/kak/kakrc
plug chambln/kakoune-readline config %{
    map global insert <tab> <c-n>
    map global insert <s-tab> <c-p>
    map global insert <c-p> <up>
    map global insert <c-n> <down>
    hook global WinCreate .* readline-enable
}

Use <a-tab> to insert a tab character; or omit the config clause if you’d rather not use tab for completion.

Manual

Put a copy of or link to readline.kak anywhere within your ~/.config/kak/autoload/ directory.

Usage

Manually enable Readline mappings in the current window:

:readline-enable<ret>

Enable Readline mappings for the sh filetype:

# ~/.config/kak/kakrc
hook global WinSetOption filetype=sh %{
    readline-enable
    hook window WinSetOption filetype=.* readline-disable
}

Always use Readline mappings:

# ~/.config/kak/kakrc
hook global WinCreate .* readline-enable

To-do

• Implement reverse-search-history (C-r) and forward-search-history (C-s).
• Maybe respect %opt{extra_word_chars}?

Bugs and notes

• <c-a-h> kills two words backward if the cursor is exactly one character into the latter, e.g. one two t|hree four becomes one |hree four where | represents the cursor.

• transpose-char and transpose-word traverse line breaks.

• If the cursor is in the middle of the word, delete-horizontal-space deletes whitespace after it.

• The <c-u> (unix-line-discard) mapping overrides Kakoune’s default:

  <c-u>
      commit changes up to now as a single undo group