[worksonmine]

That comparison table is strange and sometimes wrong. Neovim for example detects and updates external file changes by default. And the coherence of the keybindings in Ki is "Great" bit vim/helix:

> As you can see, there's no single logical categorization for these keymaps, they are either lowercase-uppercase, normal-alt, left-right bracket, or outright unexplainable.

Word, End, Back, Change Word and even Change Inner (, etc are very logical to me and I feel like I'm talking to the editor when editing. I get that it doesn't make sense when one has learned another way to do it, but it does make total sense you just have to make an effort to try and understand it.

It's like learning and always driving automatic then calling manual "outright unexplainable". You simply learned another way and are conditioned into believing that's the one true way. It shows the creator comes from VSCode (multi-cursor is a useless feature, just use s/search/replace and get used to macros and a whole new world will open).

[teo_zero]

Re. incoherence of vim's keybindings, I partially agree.

Most of the times, shift means "bigger", and only in a few places it means "invert".

Examples of "bigger" are all the motions involving words vs. WORDS, where WORDS are a broader interpretation of words; "V" is like "v" but by lines, thus in larger chunks; "C", "D", "Y" do the same as their unshifted counterparts, but extended to the end of line; etc.

Examples of shift meaning "invert" are fewer, and all sound irrational to me:

With x/X and o/O, the shift inverts the direction left/right or above/below, but we don't have for example i/I to insert to the left/right of the cursor, and H is not the opposite of h, J is not the opposite of j, etc.

With n/N, shift inverts next and previous. Why not n/p? I know, I know: p was already taken for paste, but still...

Finally, t/T/f/F are completely mixed up. In my mental model, t/f sound like to/from and I'd rather use them to move forward/backward till (not including) a char, while T/F would be the "bigger" variants which include the destination char.

[Izkata]

i/I is because we already have a, and A is a super-a in the same way I is a super-i.

[davidee]

I think you've touched on it, but I'm going try to take it one step further into explicitness.

Just over a year ago I decided to switch to Neovim. The reason for switching was personal; I was struggling with what I'll call "clutter" in other tools and I wanted a tool that would reinforce, at least lightly, a mode of working that promoted focus on what I was working on, while making it easy to reference other files without loading up my editor with tabs and other visual clutter (buttons/menus) I don't care about most of the time.

I took the advice I seemed to bump into repeatedly: try out vim mode in my current editor before making the plunge.

I really struggled at first. It felt wildly foreign. All the shortcuts were nowhere near to the world I was familiar with.

As I was about to give up, I ran into some advice that was along the lines of "stop trying to memorize shortcuts and start thinking in terms of what you want to achieve" (words and motions in vim-speak).

Your example of [C]hange [I]nner is a great one; that one in particular was life changing. Sure there are some words and motions that do require memorization, but so many others just flow naturally. And once you start thinking in actions, it's easy to see how they can layer on top of each other in really elegant ways.

I'm not even here trying to tout vim-like editors, I'd wager there are many editors that have some semblance of this kind of interaction, but rather to reiterate there's a shift from a PoV of function vs. goal.

Again, I don't think this is "the right way" but rather one of many perspectives that works in context with the phenomenology of me.

[pbronez]

I had an experience like this when I switched to a Keyboardio split keyboard. It was impossible to use at first. Then I do some deliberate practice with a typing tutor app and now I love it so much I own multiple.

Is there a good tutorial for some of these advanced text editing features?

In particular I’d like to get platform independent shortcuts / key bindings. I use both windows and MacOS daily, and it throws off my muscle memory for shortcuts like “go to beginning of line”

[hou32hou]

> It shows the creator comes from VSCode

Hey, one of the creators here, I actually daily drove Neovim for two years, before switching to Helix for a while, then finally Ki.

> multi-cursor is a useless feature

I was a Neovim macro user until I figured out how insane that was compared to multi-cursor after using Helix.

[cassepipe]

I still think their point about search and replace still stand though. I make most my edits with regex in neovim nowadays and I feel this is the superior paradigm: You don't even need to get to some specific location in order to edit it. I also almost only use search to move around the file and I can even reuse the searches for substitutions. It makes most vim motions and commands almost useless for me nowadays.

I also feel like macros are a more clunky and error prone way to do what substitutions can do. Almost never use them.

[gorjusborg]

Yeah, macros are definitely helpful at times, but not as much as one might think.

I think the same goes for multi-cursor, though.

[worksonmine]

> I was a Neovim macro user until I figured out how insane that was compared to multi-cursor after using Helix.

Multi-cursor was the first plugin I installed when I moved from VSCode to Vim because I was used to hitting Ctrl+d to select all words and then replacing. Does Helix do something different?

1) First I reach for <C-v> for visual block selection if everything is neatly aligned.

2) Next choice is %s/search/replace(/c if I need confirm).

3) Macros, and I love it everytime I get to use them. I just record the movements, copy what I need to copy, paste it where I need to paste it, and it's repeatable for every line or block where the *formatting* matches. And this is the important part, the words don't matter. I still feel like a wizard using them.

As far as I understand multi-cursor option 3 is a no-go without macros if the words don't match. But macros don't care as long as the movements translate to the same edits. How does Helix multi-cursor work that make macros insane?

[hou32hou]

Sorry for derailing a bit, the search and replace using a query make sense for purly textual (non-syntactic) editing, but if you want to apply consistent syntactic modifications across multiple locations in the same file, you will need both multi-cursor and syntax node selection/navigation/modification.

It's hard to explain unless you actually try Ki, because it is a paradigm shift

[worksonmine]

Or you could use grn for LSP rename[1] in Neovim and it will rename all references across the project. VSCode and other IDEs have a similar feature, but compared to multi-cursor that's cheating.

I'll give you that using the AST to select the references is an interesting addition to multi-cursor, but I still don't see how they would be useful compared to my current workflow.

[1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp/#vim.lsp.buf.rename()