Vim spirit

I've spent a few minutes with Kakoune (what a name) and Helix. Feels a bit like an infidelity, but it's really not. Each of these is not the 'vi', but it is a 'vi', the way my franken-forths are still Forths.

Kak and hx get many things more right than vim: object/action order: the ability to select (and see the selection) first then act on the selection(s). It's really the right way to go about editing text, and there are many articles on the subject that do the argument more justice than I can.

Importantly, they get rid of the off-by-one nonsense. My problem with vim is that I am always a line or a character off. I just can't grok why it moves my cursor sometimes, or why cutting and pasting a line swaps the line order, or many other things that I am sure I could somehow get used to. But it seems that vim does not think that the principle of least surprise is of any importance.

In the end I am not a power user -- I got by on maybe 10 memorized key-sequences in Emacs, and about the same in vim. So it's kind of annoying that 6 out of 10 commands I use daily makes no sense...

I still love vim for its history, and its weirdnesses. But I feel like trying on some variants.

Posted in: s/vim

🚀 stack [mod]

2023-09-09 · 8 months ago · 👍 gyaradong

1 Comment

🐉 gyaradong · 2023-09-11 at 06:28:

I figured you'd enjoy them.