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I find that the default movement commands in Emacs match Lisp syntax pretty well (although paredit is much better still, when quotes and commas are involved e.g

I find that the default movement commands in Emacs match Lisp syntax pretty well (although paredit is much better still, when quotes and commas are involved e.g.), but when I switch to C++, they're infuriating. Since I'm editing code written in a programming language and not text written in a natural language the forward-word command can often jump over an entire line worth of C++ tokens, and sometimes it jumps into the middle of a token. This mismatch is really tiresome. Vim commands usually hit closer to the "move by token" motivation, even though it's still just regular expressions. And so editing in it is a breeze (but then it has other disadvantages that deter me from it). Overall, I don't think you need the full power of paredit when programming. For any given language, your editor movement commands understanding what tokens in this language look like will usually already be sweet and enough.

didibus 6y ago
Oh ya, Emacs default movements aren't great for more line oriented syntaxes, even for s-expressions I have customized things a lot more to my liking and smartparens isn't part of default Emacs either. I don't think Emacs really expect you to stick to defaults, the whole editor is designed to be customized. When I edit the non s-expressions languages I mentioned I do it in IntelliJ, sometimes with the vim bindings.
- yakubin 6y ago
  In my experience, it's not about being line-oriented. It's about being punctuation heavy or not. Lisp, except parens, for the most part doesn't have all that much punctuation (quotes and commas are rare). Now let's take this program in C++: #include <iostream> int main() { std::cout << "hello, world!" << std::endl; } If my cursor is after "main", then M-f will move my cursor to after "std". It completely ignored "()" and "{". Another M-f moves my cursor to after "cout". Here it ignored "::". Another M-f moves the cursor to after "hello" ("<<" and the quote-mark ignored), another to after "world", and another to after "std" (quote-mark and "::" ignored) etc. It behaves similarly when hitting C-Backspace, where sometimes half a line disappears suddenly, because it was punctuation-heavy. I think once I stumbled upon code where it deleted several lines. On the other hand, when I have a variable like "big_number", then Emacs will happily jump into the middle of it. Even though it's an indivisible token in the eyes of the language's lexer. Of course there is a well-known hack of adding the "_" character to be recognised as a "word character". But it doesn't solve the issue really. The issue is that forward-word uses just one set of word-characters, instead of several sets of characters/regexes for different syntactic categories, which would enable jumping first to "cout" and then to "<<".

didibus 6y ago

Oh ya, Emacs default movements aren't great for more line oriented syntaxes, even for s-expressions I have customized things a lot more to my liking and smartparens isn't part of default Emacs either. I don't think Emacs really expect you to stick to defaults, the whole editor is designed to be customized. When I edit the non s-expressions languages I mentioned I do it in IntelliJ, sometimes with the vim bindings.

yakubin 6y ago
In my experience, it's not about being line-oriented. It's about being punctuation heavy or not. Lisp, except parens, for the most part doesn't have all that much punctuation (quotes and commas are rare). Now let's take this program in C++: #include <iostream> int main() { std::cout << "hello, world!" << std::endl; } If my cursor is after "main", then M-f will move my cursor to after "std". It completely ignored "()" and "{". Another M-f moves my cursor to after "cout". Here it ignored "::". Another M-f moves the cursor to after "hello" ("<<" and the quote-mark ignored), another to after "world", and another to after "std" (quote-mark and "::" ignored) etc. It behaves similarly when hitting C-Backspace, where sometimes half a line disappears suddenly, because it was punctuation-heavy. I think once I stumbled upon code where it deleted several lines. On the other hand, when I have a variable like "big_number", then Emacs will happily jump into the middle of it. Even though it's an indivisible token in the eyes of the language's lexer. Of course there is a well-known hack of adding the "_" character to be recognised as a "word character". But it doesn't solve the issue really. The issue is that forward-word uses just one set of word-characters, instead of several sets of characters/regexes for different syntactic categories, which would enable jumping first to "cout" and then to "<<".