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

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.