Kakvide

Kakvide is a Neovide-inspired GUI for Kakoune.

The spark for the project was a simple need: to open a Kakoune-like editor in a GUI window when there wasn't really one available.

It is built around Kakoune's kak -ui json mode, which made implementing the editor integration much faster than expected.

The overall architecture idea was taken directly from Neovide, including using gl for windows and skia-safe for cell rendering.

Features

• Native GUI for Kakoune powered by kak -ui json
• Neovide-inspired rendering architecture using gl and skia-safe
• Kakoune-compatible face and color resolution
• Completion menus, prompt overlays, and modal UI rendering
• Live font size controls with keyboard shortcuts and reset
• Mouse forwarding and improved input handling
• Multi-window support for opening external files
• macOS app integration, including menus, document opening and file associations
• Custom app and window icons

Work-in-progress

This is work in progress.

Some features aren't yet documented (e.g. see kakvide.toml), bugs are inevitable.

Kakvide uses the checked-in kakvide.toml as its bundled default config. Users can override any subset of settings with ~/.config/kakvide/config.toml, or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kakvide/config.toml when XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set.

Use kakvide --show-config to print the full effective config, including bundled defaults plus any user overrides.

LLM disclaimer

The code was developed with Codex/ChatGPT 5.4, with an adequate amount of handholding.