[konart]

> which matches well with the visual feedback Kakoune gives you.

Do you really need this feedback though? I can understand this when yanking, but if I'm going to delete the word... The whole action take much less that a second and then I proceed with my task.

Well, to each their own I guess

[ziml77]

You're taking the example too literally. The point is that using the motion first gives opens the possibility of visually confirming what the action will be taken on. The usefulness of that improves when the motion is complex. But nothing forces you to confirm, so if you're confident it's right you can immediately follow the motion with the action. That loses you no time compared to Vim.

[konart]

>when the motion is complex

>multiple cursors (from a different comment)

I agree that in this kind of case motion first may be a way to go. Basically it should look like `search && replace`. Without actually doing search && replace.

[mbarbar]

Exactly what @ziml77 said.

Even in the case of simple "wd", sometimes I have multiple cursors I am operating on at the same time (e.g. from complex regex or just through selecting multiple lines at once) so each cursor could point to fairly different things. Then, the visual feedback becomes very useful.

[andrewflnr]

The benefits pile up quickly when you want to do something even slightly more complicated. Hit w a bunch of times until the selection looks right, rather than count words. Tweak either end of the selection to catch spaces or punctuation.

You can do all this in Vim, I'm sure, but it's less mental effort in kak, because to a much greater extent you can see the results of your actions before they happen. And it's no slower if you do happen to know exactly what you're doing, because it's almost the same keystrokes in different order.