Kasane

Kakoune handles editing. Kasane rebuilds the rendering pipeline — terminal or GPU — and opens the full UI to extension: splits, image display, workspace persistence, and beyond. Extend it yourself with sandboxed WASM plugins — a complete one fits in 15 lines of Rust. Your kakrc works unchanged.

_{GPU backend (--ui gui) — cursor highlighting and color preview running as WASM plugins}

Getting Started · What's Different · Plugin Development · Vision

What You Get

alias kak=kasane and these improvements apply automatically:

• Flicker-free rendering — no more tearing on redraws
• Multi-pane without tmux — native splits with per-pane status bars
• Clipboard that just works — Wayland, X11, macOS, SSH — no xclip needed
• Correct Unicode — CJK and emoji display correctly regardless of terminal

Add --ui gui for a GPU backend with system font rendering, smooth animations, and inline image display.

Existing Kakoune plugins (kak-lsp, …) work as before. See What's Different for the full list.

Quick Start

Note

Requires Kakoune v2026.04.12 or later. Binary packages skip the Rust toolchain requirement.

Arch Linux: yay -S kasane-bin · macOS: brew install Yus314/kasane/kasane · Nix: nix run github:Yus314/kasane · From source: cargo install --path kasane

kasane file.txt               # your Kakoune config works unchanged
alias kak=kasane              # add to .bashrc / .zshrc

GPU backend: cargo install --path kasane --features gui, then kasane --ui gui.

See Getting Started for detailed setup.

Plugins

Plugins can add floating overlays, line annotations, virtual text, code folding, gutter decorations, input handling, scroll policies, and more. Bundled example plugins you can try today:

Plugin	What it does
cursor-line	Highlight the active line with theme-aware colors
color-preview	Inline color swatches next to hex values

Each plugin builds into a single .kpk package — sandboxed, composable, and ready to install. A complete plugin — here is cursor-line in its entirety:

kasane_plugin_sdk::define_plugin! {
    manifest: "kasane-plugin.toml",

    state {
        #[bind(host_state::get_cursor_line(), on: dirty::BUFFER)]
        active_line: i32 = -1,
    },

    display() {
        if state.active_line < 0 {
            return vec![];
        }
        let bg = theme_style_or(
            "cursor.line.bg",
            if is_dark_background() {
                style_bg(rgb(40, 40, 50))
            } else {
                style_bg(rgb(220, 220, 235))
            },
        );
        vec![style_line(state.active_line as u32, bg)]
    },
}

Additional plugins (fuzzy finder, pane manager, sel-badge, smooth scroll, prompt highlight, session UI, image preview) are slated to move to a future external kasane-plugin-gallery repo — recoverable from this repo's git history before the δ-3 cleanup commit.

Start writing your own:

kasane plugin new my-plugin    # scaffold from 6 templates
kasane plugin dev              # hot-reload while you edit

See Plugin Development, Plugin API, and ABI Versioning Policy.

Status

Kasane is stable as a Kakoune frontend — ready for daily use. The plugin API is evolving; see Plugin Development for the current ABI version and migration guides.

Usage

kasane [options] [kak-options] [file]... [+<line>[:<col>]|+:]

All Kakoune arguments work — kasane passes them through to kak.

kasane file.txt              # Edit a file
kasane -c project            # Connect to existing session
kasane -s myses file.txt     # Named session
kasane --ui gui file.txt     # GPU backend
kasane -l                    # List sessions (delegates to kak)

See docs/config.md for configuration.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and guidelines.

cargo test                             # Run all tests
cargo clippy -- -D warnings            # Lint
cargo fmt --check                      # Format check

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0