For example, maybe you need to delete the next two words (d2w - delete 2 words). Or maybe you want to delete the next four words, then replace them with something else (c4w - change 4 words). Or maybe you need to change the every letter of the next ten lines to uppercase, until you hit the letter 'a' on each line (qq0gUtaj10@q).
VIMs shortcuts aren't better because they're more powerful, they're better because there's an infinite combination of them.
More generally, my experience of vim is that I'd spend longer working out how to do something with one command than I'd have taken to just use a few simpler actions. And that didn't really get better with time (I used it as my primary editor for a few years), because sufficiently complicated editing tasks just don't arise that often.
And personally, I find Sublime's multiple selections much easier to apply in ad-hoc ways to unusual editing scenarios than vim's vocabulary.
A common scenario I encounter, is that I realise I need to make a change in many matching places, but I don't know immediately whether it applies to the entire file, or whether there are some edge cases. In Sublime, I select one instance, step through adding matching ones to the selection and excluding any I don't want, and then make the edit confident that I'm changing exactly the things I want to.
In vim, my experience was that I'd write a substitution, discover it was too general when it broke something, and then try to work out how to exclude the cases I didn't want, which was often nontrivial. EDIT: Thinking about it now, I guess the vim way to do the above would be to / for the first case, make the change in insert mode and then use /. for the others. Although if it's a complicated edit, it might not be effective to use insert mode, so I'd need a macro maybe? I found those kinda fiddly tbh.
I completely agree that often figuring out how many words I want to apply a command to is too much effort; however of course vim has visual selection like any other editor, so I can just press v to begin selecting, then w a few times to move to the beginning of the next word, and then I can apply any of the verbs in my arsenal to the resulting selection.
I find that having the option of <count> repetition is much more useful with large text objects that I can easily subitize. It's very natural for me to delete 3 paragraphs with `d3}` for instance, moreso than selecting them then deleting them.
I think that my very favorite motion in vim might be the `f` key. You use it like `fj` to move to the next occurrence of 'j' on the current line.
I also agree with you that multiple cursors are a much better solution than regexes to the same edit in a few different nearby places. There are multiple selection plugins for vim, but they don't work very well, and I wish it had better support. On the other hand, regexes scale much much better.
Except those don't make much sense as compositions, because they overload the letters. cap? What does change-append-paste mean? Oh it actually means change-a-paragraph? Okay...
Sure, there are some convenient patterns to vim's shortcuts, but I think the extent to which they're a "language" is overstated. And that's fine, since it's mostly about muscle memory anyway.
>I think that my very favorite motion in vim might be the `f` key.
Yeah I did miss that one for a while.
>On the other hand, regexes scale much much better.
If I want regexes, I can use find and replace with them. And I think the minimal (keyboard driven) GUI is a lot easier to use for that than s/// syntax.
<Ctrl-D><Bksp> to delete a word.
<Ctrl-Shift-D> to duplicate a line. [0]
<Ctrl-F> for search.
<Ctrl-Home/End> to go to the top or bottom.
I'm increasingly unconvinced that vim has much to offer in terms of shortcuts when compared to actual modern editors, rather than some kind of strawman notepad.
[0] No numeric repetition, but I was never convinced by that feature TBH. In most cases, the mental overhead of working out the appropriate number for a situation was greater for me than just spamming a button a few times.