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Comment by bluetech | Hacker News Reader

vim allows you to select a region and operate on it. It sometimes necessary, but in practice, people use the compositional commands. They are faster and mentally easier. So empirically it seems your preference is different than most.

Also, what do you mean, maps better to other forms of editing?

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I think you're getting close to some important points.

I think Sublime Text's multiple-cursor editing is nice because I can see where the focus is and get immediate feedback, much better than "replace-all" even if the end result would be the same. Bret Victor style.

So most of the real complexity in the interface is about region-selection, and the operations are actually trivial.

Of course, you need to first select regions (like interesting lines), then select other regions within those, others within those etc. How to chain it all in a natural way?

The multiple-cursor is a nice blend between stateful things like regexp-replace and the purely stateless isolated ones likes vi :s/foo/bar/g

Sometimes you want feedback without leaving the declarative paradigm.

Both vim and emacs have multiple-cursor plugins.[1][2][3]

[1] - http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4523

[2] - http://emacsrocks.com/e13.html

[3] - https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el

With Emacs in Evil mode, :%s/foo/bar/ also shows you the potential replacements as you type.

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