[pheggs]

I genuinely don't like the concept of the keyboard interaction in helix and kakoune, selecting things to modify them. I don't know what it is, but it somehow just feels much less satisfactory to me personally compared to the vim way.

[ikety]

The biggest benefit is multiple cursors. The helix and kakoune multiple cursor implementation are probably the best in any editor. It just goes hand in hand with selection first.

[lawn]

The problem with that editing model for me is that it makes text objects much more cumbersome.

In Vim you can for example do "dap" to delete around a paragraph, but you cannot easily invert it ("pad") because 'p' is too common and is already bound.

You can also easily do the "select first" in Vim by first pressing 'v' to start a visual selection, so I just don't see the point.

[codezero]

This bugged me for reasons I can’t quite explain. I think it’s that I can write and edit the command before making the modification and the ease of going back and reusing a historic search and replace relatively easily.

[chongli]

I spent about a month trying to get used to Kakoune. It never clicked with me and I went back to vim.

My biggest beef with Kakoune’s editing philosophy is that it seems to emphasize “editing in the large” as its preferred mode of interaction. This is totally backwards to me. Editing in the large (making multiple identical edits throughout a buffer) is a rarity. Most edits in day to day use are single edits. So the fact that Kakoune likes to leave a bunch of extra cursors in your wake (like a trail of breadcrumbs) as you jump around a file to make single edits is extremely infuriating to me, like it’s trying too hard to be helpful.

The irony of Kakoune using a clippy-style contextual help window is not lost on me!