Opinion: Structural editing is superior to the Vim grammar https://ift.tt/Jf1OeXT I tried switching from jetbrains to various modal editors...
Opinion: Structural editing is superior to the Vim grammar https://ift.tt/Jf1OeXT I tried switching from jetbrains to various modal editors (neovim, doom-emacs, kakoune, helix). The fast startup time and continuity when working in a terminal environment was very appealing, as was the promise of increased code editing effeciency. I liked the fast startup time and having the same keybindings to edit system config files but I am not impressed with VIM style text editing. First of all programmers don't really edit text, we edit code. VIM's grammar does not acknowledge this. It is centered around lines, words etc. Code is a tree. In my opinion, you want to keybinds which traverse this tree, expand/shrink selections etc. Of course I can install tree-sitter and setup structual editing based bindings but am I really using VIM at this point? I don't think the VIM grammar is the future of code editing. I think it is a bit overrated. I think editor designers should work on developing a grammar/keybinds that center around structural/tree based editing. I have found that IDE's tend to acknowledge this tree based "reality" better than VIM. I think this concept could even be applied to source control ie. git stores an tree-sitter like representation of code instead of text. Your text editor handles formatting. 0
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