I think there's a fair amount of room for a workflow that does most meaningful commandline manipulation inside the editor, in which case leaving vim in emacs mo

I think there's a fair amount of room for a workflow that does most meaningful commandline manipulation inside the editor, in which case leaving vim in emacs mode and "just" knowing C-r and C-x C-e could be sort of reasonable. I certainly understand being skeptical of "vim modes" - they are often incomplete in painful ways. As mentioned above, I often run up against the limitations of bash vim mode when trying to change what's inside quotes.