3 ms·

It's an interesting point you make, that other editors also turn out to have some form of composability. However, the fact that this is the first time I've hear

It's an interesting point you make, that other editors also turn out to have some form of composability. However, the fact that this is the first time I've heard somebody talking about this might have some underlying meaning. Maybe vim is the only editor where people actually use the composability, because it's only in vim that it's actually usable :-) In vim, the most common way to delete a word is also the composable way, and also the shortest (just two keys). In emacs, most people probably learn the shortcuts first, so they don't have the muscle memory for the composable style. The composable style is also two modifier keys longer. So in emacs, first you learn it the "regular" way, with all the shortcuts, and then when you want to learn composability, you have to relearn all sorts of basic things, and spend more keystrokes, to have that. In vim, you've learned some basic commands (dw, c$, yia, ...), and then I tell you about composability, and you understand how you can combine all those commands and movements you already know :-)

omaranto 10y ago
I agree with everything you said. It's certainly true that Vim (well, I guess this comes from vi) takes composability much more seriously than other editors. I wish Emacs in particular took composability a little more seriously. Probably combining selecting an acting into a single repeatable command by default would be too un-Emacsy (after all, macros are very lightweight and there is evil mode), but it would be great to have all the fine-grained selection commands that Vim has. For example, AucTeX has a command to mark a LaTeX environment, but it also should have what Vim would call "inner LaTeX environment". As a more basic example, I wrote my own mark-line command because what I want to do with lines isn't always kill them! With builtins I think the best way to mark 5 whole lines starting from the one you're one is C-a C-SPC C-5 C-n, which is awful. With a mark-line command you just do M-5 M-L (depending of course on what you bind it too). There have been attempts to bring better composability to Emacs besides Vi(m) emulators, in particular in a non-modal way. But the ones I've tried haven't fully convinced me. It's definitely possible to do it, but doing it properly might be a major undertaking. Maybe I should just start using evil again.

omaranto 10y ago

I agree with everything you said. It's certainly true that Vim (well, I guess this comes from vi) takes composability much more seriously than other editors. I wish Emacs in particular took composability a little more seriously. Probably combining selecting an acting into a single repeatable command by default would be too un-Emacsy (after all, macros are very lightweight and there is evil mode), but it would be great to have all the fine-grained selection commands that Vim has. For example, AucTeX has a command to mark a LaTeX environment, but it also should have what Vim would call "inner LaTeX environment". As a more basic example, I wrote my own mark-line command because what I want to do with lines isn't always kill them! With builtins I think the best way to mark 5 whole lines starting from the one you're one is C-a C-SPC C-5 C-n, which is awful. With a mark-line command you just do M-5 M-L (depending of course on what you bind it too). There have been attempts to bring better composability to Emacs besides Vi(m) emulators, in particular in a non-modal way. But the ones I've tried haven't fully convinced me. It's definitely possible to do it, but doing it properly might be a major undertaking. Maybe I should just start using evil again.