RE: The magic of not using the enter key

This article discusses why acme and emacs feel more magical than vim, with the author suggesting it’s because the enter key makes things feel less magical.

This sort of relates to the idea that modelessness in software feels better for most people. I agree that dynamicism makes software feel nice, and emacs and acme both have that. There’s also just something very cool about how simple acme is and how effectively it works. I think that on that front emacs loses out, because a lot of the keybindings feel quite obtuse.

However one place that vim feels more magical is in its text language; operating on something like a sentence or a paragraph feels exciting to me. Even more so in the variety of editors that invert the vim word order from verb-noun to noun-verb; using kakoune and seeing the way that i can control the text to operate on so effortlessly feels like a win for software.

Sadly, i don’t know of a good way to make this text language work well in a modeless editor, except with the mouse. And unfortunately, emacs’s mouse support is still not that great.

I also think that vim does in fact have a bit of this magic. Things like the * operator, which will jump to the next occurrence of the word under the point, are nice. The emacs equivalent is isearch-forward-thing-at-point which takes two keypresses (M-s M-.) and opens up isearch, therefore also probably requiring a press of the enter key. The acme equivalent is pressing the middle mouse button, which is really nice.