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Comment by grayrest | Hacker News Reader

I've gone for several week long stretches of using it but never fully converted. What winds up happening is that I get to a point in a project where I really need to focus on the code and not the editor, switch back to vim, and don't get around to switching back for another few months. The editing model is better than Vim's and if I didn't have 20 years of vim muscle memory I probably would have switched over by now.

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I disagree that the editing model is better than vim. It’s fancier and makes for flashier demos but I don’t think it’s better. For one thing, it places the emphasis on editing in the large. That is, its default operating mode is to leave multiple cursors all over the buffer when you’re trying to jump around your file. You have to build a habit of pressing an extra key to dismiss the multiple cursors so you don’t inadvertently start inserting text in multiple places without realizing it. This is the wrong approach!

Vim puts primary emphasis on quickly getting around and making small edits one at a time. Editing in the large can be accomplished easily with the substitute ex command or search and repeat (via n and .) or macros recorded with q. For any programmer, the vast majority of their time is going to be spent editing in one place at a time. When they need to do something bigger, vim has them covered. If they’re finding they need to do some more sophisticated refactoring they probably want an IDE (or at least an LSP plug-in for vim of which there are many).

> That is, its default operating mode is to leave multiple cursors all over the buffer when you’re trying to jump around your file.

That's not true, motion commands don't create new selections. Search will create a new selection only if you explicitly ask for that by pressing shift N.

You can do the Vim approach just fine, and I usually do. I write prose in kak for goodness' sake, I don't usually have multiple cursors for that. The only time I accidentally get extra selections, besides old muscle memory triggering that feature in search with shift-N, is when I accidentally click in the terminal, which was going to mess me up with any editor.

But occasionally it's very nice to actually have that multiple selection feature. For instance, suppose you have a search and replace that you only want to do on certain instances of your search, in a context dependent way. You could just use n and . repeatedly. However, I find it nicer to examine each selection, drop the inappropriate ones individually, recheck my work, then do all the edits at once. This also eliminates (granted, by defining it away) the problem of changing your mind halfway through the search process about what change you want to make. When you change your mind, your cursor is either still live in all the places, or you're done, in which case at least there's only one thing to search for again, not the half that were changed and the half you hadn't reached yet.

> is when I accidentally click in the terminal, which was going to mess me up with any editor.

Well, most terminal editors don’t capture the mouse at all — this is what I personally prefer (let the terminal emulator handle it) and as a bonus it fixes this problem.

When I last looked at Kakoune, it struck me as “Vim with training wheels,” in the best sense of the term. In other words, it has (all of?) vim’s keyboard commands, but with more visual feedback to show what they are doing live. I envisioned myself learning with Kakoune and eventually migrating to vim once they became ingrained. Or, at the very least, becoming proficient in vim so that I could use it more confidently when needed.

Has that been anyone’s experience?

I don't believe that'd help.

Editing in Kakoune encourages and enforces a different editing style (one based on visual selection).

You'd have to still learn Vim.

Personally, I played https://vim-adventures.com/ to get a basic grip on Vim, later I kept a cheat sheet handy, and yet later I just looked up commands and features as necessary.

I recommend disabling the arrow keys in your vim config and to just use it.

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