Comment by msdz
4 hours ago
As someone familiar with Helix, I’m curious. Could you elaborate on this?
Because I’m not disagreeing with your point, I’m actually not getting it in the first place. How does jumping around affect your selection count? Which motion(s) are you performing that larger quantities of text are getting "selected" in the first place?
I can’t speak for helix because I haven’t tried it, but I did spend a few weeks trying to get used to Kakoune before giving up and going back to vim.
The issue is that moving around would leave behind a trail of breadcrumbs. Sometimes these were visible cursors but other times they were invisible. Either way, I found myself being frequently surprised by the editor when it made changes I was not expecting.
Perhaps it’s something I could get used to with more time but it left me constantly perplexed and annoyed. I think ultimately what gets me is that in vim I can type a motion key and vim executes the motion and then returns to to a “null state” whereas with motion-action editors any time I key in a motion to jump somewhere I am now in the middle of the “motion-action” sequence and the editor is awaiting an action key to which it will eagerly respond. This to me feels very wrong, similar to the feeling I get when Siri is continuing to listen for more commands after invoking the command I asked for. Having to dismiss Siri all the time annoys the hell out of me.
Kakoune has a similar “dismiss key” which I remember pressing all the time out of habit, even when it was unnecessary, because the editor left me with this constant feeling of “unstable footing.”