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Comment by zenspider | Hacker News Reader

"Once you get the hang of that, you'll find yourself cursing any editor that doesn't have an easy way to move to the end of the 3rd word from the current location."

I find myself cursing any editor that is moded. Moded editing is simply wrong. That said, I doubt there is any movement command in vi that is missing from emacs. The editors are the same in basic text-editing functionality. They differ drastically in philosophy and extended functionality.

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Ok... well here is something that especially bothers me when working at my shell prompt. In vim, I press W to skip to the first character of the next word, where the only word delimiter is whitespace. In emacs, M-f moves forward to the next word, but any punctuation (including underscores, strangely) is considered to be a separator. So how do I perform this movement in emacs?

In vim, I press l to move to the right one character. In emacs, it's C-f or I have to reach for the right arrow. Do you really think the movement commands in emacs are just as convenient as vim?

I think moded editors mirror the desired functionality perfectly. In some cases, I just want to be typing a lot of stuff, and when I'm doing that, I'm in Insert mode. In other cases, I want to move around the file and make various minor edits, and for this I'm in Normal mode. How is that "simply wrong"? It's basically similar to when a user of a point-and-click IDE would switch from typing stuff to pointing-and-clicking on stuff.

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