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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

I was excited for avy until I realized its purpose is only to move the cursor to a place visible on the screen. It does nothing a mouse can't do with one click.

(This is my understanding at least; I'm open to correction.)

I'm a lover of Vim bindings, and so I appreciate keyboard controls, but where Vim enables working with files and text in a general and powerful way, avy enables avoiding one click with the mouse. I don't use Vim to avoid the mouse, I use it so I can hack some Vim macros together when I'm editing text on a text-level. Vim (or Emacs) is an eternal tool that can do big things, avy just positions my cursor.

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Definitely not it's purpose. Avy can be used to select a word, line, or region. One action is move to it. But it can also, in it's own words, copy, yank, zap to, transpose, teleport, kill, mark, ispell, org-refile, and custom actions.

https://karthinks.com/software/avy-can-do-anything/

I've bounced off that blog post in the past, because it makes it appear the first step to doing something in avy is to position all my files and "windows" (a "window" is an editing pane inside Emacs) in some clever way, and after I got all that setup, and the windows are all looking at just the right parts of the files, then I can move a paragraph from one window to another with just a few special keystrokes.

I feel like moving from a large monitor to a small monitor would limit the usefulness of avy; it's weird that the physical size of a monitor would limit a tool like this.

If I can only see 3 lines of text at a time (maybe an accessibility thing), the usefulness of Vim-bindings is not significantly reduced. Is the same true for avy?

Again, I'm willing to learn that I was wrong, but this is the specific issue that ended my enthusiasm for learning avy.

I would agree that the usefulness is reduced if you have tight vertical space constraints (3 lines of text).

It's really a selector or a filter. It's power comes from combining it with other tools.

Can you elaborate. I just use it by itself and think it is wonderful, but I am curious for some examples of using it with other tools.

EDIT: I just looked at the link posted by lvass and I understand now. So cool! I am going to update my workflow.

> It does nothing a mouse can't do with one click.

But the you'd need to take the hands off keyboard, also it might be slightly more precise as a typo is less likely than a less-than-perfect mouse movement

Don't underestimate the advantage of being able to move the cursor anywhere in a few clicks without having to take your hands off the keyboard. It is much faster than a mouse. Also, you can save your elbows the pain of constantly reaching over for the mouse.

avy does more than just jump the cursor to a specific place. It also allows you search for, copy and move text round without needing to move your cursor to that text. It is extremely easy to use and very efficient.

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