no, what i mean is that they moved a whole list of motions into selection/extension mode. You can’t just press shift+w or shift+alt+i, you need to think “do i want to jump to the next selector, or do i want to extend the selection to it?”, press or not press v, and only then press w, alt+i or whatever. It’s literally vim2: the electric bogaloo in that aspect, because the user needs to think of a verb first: jump or extend in this case, then select nouns: word, paragraph, etc., then select the verb again, this time the actual operation i want to do to my selection. This practically defeats the whole point of the verb-noun motion reversal that the kakoune dev expressed first, and the helix dev repeated after.

I learnt about helix first, so it wasn’t much of an issue, since a) i was just learning the motions, so i wasn’t striving for speed just yet b) i had no point of comparison… Until i tried kakoune. After that the idiocy of that design became apparent, and it can’t stop frustrating me ever since.

P.S. i remember seeing the discussion about helix future plugin support back in 2023, when i just found it. Since it’s still just “in the works”, i’m feeling really skeptical about it, and about whether the plugin infrastructure will grow big enough. Kakoune is much more mature in that aspect