[eviks]

> Typically I'm working on code that I wrote, or I've been studying it enough that I've gotten to the point that I'm refactoring and editing it

That doesn't explain it. You can't know for any "foo" whether all the content, including comments, has "foo" as a subword for any non-trivial amount of text because you're not a computer.

> so you have to do another step?

No, you reduce many steps having to specify word-based selection every time with a cognitive overhead ("If there are other words") with a single default.

> I can pick word selection or not dynamically

So can I, and I don't need to do precision jumping in the middle of a combined text field to do that, but that's a different benefit

> It isn't clear to me what your approach is, "incrementalism"

when instead of counting 5 lines and selecting them you press a selection key the amount of times is needed to select what you need

> I can select the body of a function

and as I've pointed out, that's a different workflow. You've added a "in this semantic block" requirement and mistakenly compare it to the original incremental one

> just another way of doing it, not fewer steps.

it is fewer steps, I've pointed out which steps are not needed, and then there is another condition complicating your simple explanation when it's not a certainty that you actually want to replace everything within a block. But again, within semantic blocks there are different tradeoffs

[tasty_freeze]

I'm not dumb and I'm sure you aren't either, so I think we are failing to imagine the same scenario the other is.

>> I can select the body of a function > and as I've pointed out, that's a different workflow. You've added a "in this > semantic block" requirement and mistakenly compare it to the original > incremental one

Yes, I picked that scenario because doing search & replace on all vars of a given name across the whole file doesn't require selection. Yes, I would normally want to replace that var name when it appears in comments too. Yes, I typically have a very good if not perfect knowledge of whether foobar is a variable name only or might appear as a substring of something else. If my variable name was "n" then I'd have to take more care.

[eviks]

> across the whole file

The original scenario explicitly states "not every instance in the open file ", so not sure why you bring that up

> in comments

same, where is this coming from? That adds no difference to these 2 workflows

> very good ... knowledge

This is just self-deception, you don't have the full text with auto-matching built into your brain, and since 'n' is an rethorical alternative, in reality you wouldn't even have a great way of knowing when to take more care

[tasty_freeze]

Clearly you know what work I do better than I know do.

[eviks]

Clearly I know the basic capabilities of a human mind better than you do.

But also: how is your very serious "I know all the text" limitation relevant to this general comparison of 2 approaches?