Comment by TeddyDD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeddyDD | Hacker News Reader

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I used to think Vim and company are only worth it when you work with structured text (like programming languages) most of the time.

I'm not so sure nowadays. I had to work on big prose document in Libre Office. I hated every second of it. It might be because I used to modal editing. It felt like typing with one finger when you are used to touch typing...

I got question. It here anyone who learned Vim editing model and decided it's worse than „traditional” Cua, mouse oriented editors[1]?

I can't remember seeing any blog posts like „I used Vim for X years but I switched to Cua editor”.

[1]: well, I switched to Kakoune from Spacemacs but that's another modal editor (not Vi clone tho) so it doesn't count ;)

What exactly were you missing? Could it be that you're just not used to the shortcuts that let you navigate with the cursor, remove previous word etc.?

That was an issue, yes. I know basic shortcuts ({ctrl, shift} + arrows, ctrl+backspace) but I assume someone used to Cua editor would know more tricks. I missed actions like:

  - select to given character
  - select to begging/end of the line/whole line
  - select sentence/paragraph/text with the same indentation

I know some of those actions are available with multiple mouse clicks (3 clicks to select paragraph If I recall correctly) but that means you have to use mouse.

Beside this ctrl+f search is not as good as / in Vim. It has no regex support for example (you can open dialog that has option to enable regex but that's more than one shortcut away).

Actions in Cua editor cannot be composed and reused, that's also an issue for me.

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