[nequo]

I agree with this sentiment. Line editing is to ASTs as a 4-speed automatic transmission is to a CVT. It is limited only by historical baggage and the power of habit.

> Of course I can install tree-sitter and setup structual editing based bindings but am I really using VIM at this point?

Why would this mean that you are not using Vim?

You are using Vim with a Vim extension that gives you better keybindings. That extension happens to pull in Tree-sitter, in the same way as Atom would. But your setup is faster and consumes much less memory.

Or to put it differently: Vim and Emacs both link to libpcre for regular expression parsing, but that doesn't mean that if you use regular expressions in Vim, you are using Emacs.