> I would say Vim is an imperative editor. It’s interesting you say this, since I’ve always thought of it in precisely the opposite way! A traditional editor i

> I would say Vim is an imperative editor. It’s interesting you say this, since I’ve always thought of it in precisely the opposite way! A traditional editor is thoroughly imperative: all editing operations are built up by sequencing basic commands, almost exclusively ‘insert/delete a character’, ‘move to this line/column’, and ‘select from line/column position X to position Y’. By contrast, Vim gives me an entire declarative language to work with text: if I want to ‘delete a word’, or ‘change the next 10 lines’, or ‘move to the previous occurrence of the identifier under the cursor’, I can just do that, without having to mentally break it up into sequences of smaller editing operations. I suppose this all goes to reinforce a point I’ve made several times before, which is that ‘declarativity’ is more of a continuum rather than a state. Calling something ‘declarative’ without context isn’t very helpful, but it’s entirely valid to say that most text editors are less declarative than Vim, and Vim is in turn less declarative than the refactoring operations in a full-featured IDE.