[cassepipe]

I am a vim user and I wonder what is the use of going five words forward when you can just search for the beginning of the word you want to go to and press enter (even works across lines).

After using vim for a while now I do most of my navigation and editing by searching/replacing

[kragen]

yes, usually it's better to do a search in both vim and emacs, unless you're recording a keyboard macro or using multiple cursors. commonly in the macro or multicursor case, the search string would be different on every line you're trying to make the edit on

[cocok]

I wouldn't say either is better "usually", it really depends on the situation.

If the next five words begin with the same prefix (happens to me), searching will be wasteful. Just spamming "w" is easier.

But when there's something really distinctive (often, punctuation) near the position I'm aiming for, I'll definitely use search.

That's one of the reasons I prefer BRE over ERE/PCRE when editing text interactively - I can search for punctuation in code without having to backslash-escape it.

[kragen]

you have some good points

'bre vs. ere' is terminology i wasn't familiar with, though i've often tripped over the differences: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/BRE-vs-ERE...

iirc mit teco used control characters for its regexp metacharacters to diminish this particular problem