Isn't that what neovim is trying to do?
But I think Kakoune https://kakoune.org would fit the bill
I think the basic premise of multiple cursors editing as a preferred model (which is what Kakoune does) is flawed. Why? Because large-scale scale changes are the exception, not the rule. By emphasizing multiple cursors, Kakoune actively makes it harder to do the normal thing people do in a text editor: jump around a file and make specific edits to individual lines. Instead, a bunch of normal movement commands (such as forward and backward search) leave extra cursors in your wake, forcing you to press an extra key to dismiss them otherwise you'll get erroneous edits that might not even be visible from where you are in the buffer. This is not a good thing.
The other basic premise that Kakoune addresses (that vim commands lack visual feedback) is not even an issue for experienced vim users who type commands quickly from muscle memory. The edits happen when the command finishes and you don't get distracted by intermediate results. For global substitution, you can always append the `c` flag to add a confirmation prompt to each substitution. That alone obviates much of the motivation for Kakoune's model.
Others have tried kakoune and really loved it. I don't understand it. I really tried to figure it out, I just don't grok it.
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-the-vi/9780596...
kakoune provides a limited orthogonal toolset that composes extremely well. After a week using kakoune I felt at least as confident with its command language as I did with vim's after years of use. Aside from a few vim plugins that were super helpful, I didn't miss anything after transitioning, except for the 'R' command (and to a lesser extent proper integration between the 'r' and '.' commands).
I worried that kakoune's multiple selection paradigm wouldn't scale well, that it wouldn't be routinely useful, etc. On the contrary, I use multiple selections heavily, often as a more ergonomic alternative to recorded macros, constantly for rectangle-based operations (whether multi-line editing, indenting, ASCII art creation, whatever).
Oh, for you tmux lovers out there, kakoune integrates amazingly well. All of its multi-window functionality directly uses tmux panes, with a server application (think emacs-server) tying everything together.
In terms of ecosystem, vim is much richer. But kakoune is a practical, beautifully designed tool.
> Kakoune actively makes it harder to do the normal thing people do in a text editor: jump around a file and make specific edits to individual lines. Instead, a bunch of normal movement commands (such as forward and backward search) leave extra cursors in your wake, forcing you to press an extra key to dismiss them otherwise you'll get erroneous edits
Do you find that's the case? If so, how do you deal with it? Just remember to dismiss the extra cursors?
Multiple selection has surprised me in its usefulness. It took a bit to get used to multi-step operations (select, then move/expand/match, then modify, etc.), but the beauty of this is that it's possible to incrementally undo these steps, unlike having to get the whole thing right in one go in vim. I find myself using regex captures in multiple selection -- another example of how I confidently use basic kakoune functionality where I used to rely on recorded macros in vim.
Most of what I do in vim is now so heavily ingrained in muscle memory that I just don't think, I see the text change to what I want it to be. Perhaps that's too hard of a habit to break for me.