Vimpulse and vim-mode

Wed Mar 2 10:12:22 CET 2011

Am Dienstag, 1. März 2011 schrieb Vegard Øye:
> On 2011-03-01 18:41 +0100, Tim Harper wrote:
> > Perhaps it's just me, but if it's a choice between interoperability
> > with Emacs at the cost of 97% compatibility with vim, and 100%
> > compatibility with them at the cost of reduced interoperability
> > with Emacs commands, I would prefer sacrificing the vim
> > compatibility. If 100% vim compatibility were important to me, I
> > would use vim.
>
> Well put. I totally agree.

I also agree. But I AM one of those who use both, vim and emacs, vim for 
quick changes and emacs for the real stuff, and sometimes even trivial 
differences become, well, not problems but nconveniences, if your 
fingers decide on their own which keys to press. For example, I once 
got a bug-report, because vim-mode placed cursor after a search-word 
command * after the found occurence (inherited from isearch that time) 
while vim puts the cursor at the beginning of that word. The reporter 
was used to type * again to repeat the search which did not work in 
vim-mode because the cursor was not ON the word. I never realized that 
this was problem because I'm used to type n to repeat the search - but 
everyone has its own workflow and so this was a valid bug-report.

I completely agree that we should not focus on 100% vim compatibility 
(even sometimes Vim does things wrong IMO). We should just be prepared 
that sometimes incompatibilities or inconveniences may arise that are 
no problem for one user but are important for the other (and this with 
a good reason as the example above illustrates). So if the effort is 
not too big we should try to be as close as possible to vim without 
overemphasizing this goal.

In any case, user feedback is important to receive information where 
those unexpected differences are.

Bye,
Frank