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Comment by xiaq | Hacker News Reader

Because they are not very reasonable?

* "dd" isn't reasonable because it violates the "command + movement/region" structure of vi commands. So is "cc" and "yy". None of "c d y" is not a movement or region. Presumably in this editor "_" represents the "whole line" region, which leads to also "c_" and "y_". Much more regular although it does require you to lift your finger one more time.

* "cw" isn't reasonable because "w" as a movement usually means "to the next word", but in "cw" it means "to the end of current word" instead. "ce" is indeed better.

* "r" is actually not bad (indeed "rx" is equivalent to "clx<Esc>", but the former requires 2 keystrokes), but I guess it's because the author rarely uses it.

Anyway the editor is pretty small, it might be easy or even fun to hack it! :)

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The reasons you cite are the reasons why it is that way. Concerning the 'c' command, I leave it that way until people are so annoyed that they have to dive in the code themselves, it is a kind of social experiment. I got used to not using it.

I went through lots of thinking to make the code nice and clean and would like to see if it is indeed that way by having people modify it.

'"cw" isn't reasonable because "w" as a movement usually means "to the next word", but in "cw" it means "to the end of current word" instead. "ce" is indeed better.'

I've recently been noticing this - dw behaves like dw, but cw behaves like ce and there's no way to express a real cw in a short number of keystrokes. Despite it breaking my muscle memory, I believe I approve of this change.

> there's no way to express a real cw in a short number of keystrokes.

dwi is pretty short.

... but not a single action. This is important when I want to repeat things.

Good point. It seems likely that caw will suit most of the time, but I can't think of an exact replacement.

Right, caw is probably the closest; cf<Space> is what I defaulted to earlier in my vi-ing, which is a little further away but also usually close enough.

Thanks, I didn't know about caw, because I learned vi on Solaris, which had real vi and not vim.

The a and i modifiers are great things - they can also be combined with most grouping characters (parens, brackets, braces, quotes).

Reasonable or not, dd and cw are wired into the fingers of almost every vi user, so they will indeed be a major turn-off for many. They are for me.

dd, cc and yy violate that pattern of vi commands, but they form their own pattern. (g~~ is another instance of it.)

I agree that cw violates a pattern, but I think it's a reasonable violation. (Not necessarily good, but reasonable.

Given that you can get cw behavior with ce, I don't really think the original breaking of cw was reasonable (though I expect it went the other way and cw existed before vi settled into its current verb-noun philosophy).

I agree with you on the doublings - probably makes most sense to preserve them.

That is a reasonable argument against the existing cw behaviour. I consider this to be a reasonable argument in favour: when you delete a word, you probably also want to delete the space after it; when you change a word, you probably don't.

There are reasonable arguments on both sides, and I don't think that the balance is overwhelmingly on either side, so I consider either choice to be reasonable.

(In general, to show that something is unreasonable, you can't simply present arguments against it. You need to show that the arguments supporting it are weak.)

I think that argument would be much stronger if forgoing deletion of the space was hard to do - but it's literally one key over. Further, it mucks with peoples' intuitions about what range w actually covers - something I'm only recently overcoming after 20+ years with vi and vim.

Meanwhile, I have found myself in the position of wanting to delete the space and had no way to express it (as a single action that I can redo with .).

> Presumably in this editor "_" represents the "whole line" region, which leads to also "c_" and "y_".

That's not specific to this editor. In vim _ goes from the cursor to the end of the line (but does not include the newline at the end like $ does).

It's a reasonable expectation, and they're reasonable shortcuts. They many not conform to as strict syntax as other vim shortcuts, but english doesn't conform to any of it's own rules and I doubt we would call it unreasonable. All language is an abstraction of modelling the worlds things and concepts into sound.

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