You've oddly crystallized why Kakoune has so far failed to grab me!

The description you gave of the actions one takes in editing makes sense: in most non-modal editors, you select the text you want to take actions on, then choose the action to take. But, I can do that in literally every modeless editor! That's the way essentially all of them work.

But when people write of "Vim as a text editing language" as many comments here do, the action -> object model -- again, at least for me -- fits the pattern. We say "I'm going to the store," not "store I'm going to," unless Yoda we are. And, most programming languages that aren't purely object-oriented tend to follow a rough pattern of "action(parameter)". So in editors like Sublime Text (or VSCode or BBEdit or...) I tend to do editing in an entirely visual way, Vim approaches editing in a more language-based way, and when you describe edits in language, "[verb] the [noun]" is pretty natural.

In English, sure. Not in Hindi for example (मैं खाना खाता हूँ - 'I food eat') or in .. object-oriented methods of many programming languages.

I don't think there's anything special about that mapping, whichever way around. I'm not inclined to think I'd perceive things or act any differently if my main way of describing things (English) had a different grammar - a rose would smell just as sweet.

I can see some value, especially for beginners, in 'highlight while object selecting, then act' (which you can do in vim with visual select and then action, e.g. instead of c2w do v2wc - or v2w -wait no that's not what I want-).

I do prefer it as it is though, probably just because I'm used to it, but I think of it as 'up to' rather than 'define the object', since it is always anchored (at least, without any plugins doing differently like is being discussed with Treesitter here, adding context awareness) by the cursor position. So I'm thinking 'change from here to..'. I suppose if one wants to think about 'object first' you could argue vim already is that anyway - you move to the object before typing any of the command.

Some languages use both orders, and the difference is more of a stylistic choice.

Indeed, in Spanish we say "lava la ropa" do the laundry. I am pretty sure that is what my brain wants, action object. Once in object-oriented training I was told that In Cantonese the person does not act on objects but the objects act on themselves: "The deck of cards shuffles itself"

Latin has an extremely flexible word order (some of which Old English had too) which allows all kinds of fun stuff for style and communicating status/education. Japanese with its particle system also allows some good flexibility.

I tend to pick and measure a piece of wood before turning my saw and cutting.

I say that I am cutting the wood. But I select it first before marking it and cutting it.

I noticed that I use the visual mode of vim a lot. With easy motion to highlight words or other object boundaries to quickly jump to.

I tried kakoune and liked it. But after 15y of (neo)vim it's hard to change. That plus how good You completeMe is for vim.

Well, the reality is that WYSIWYG editing of all sorts is object oriented. You first select the object and then the action.

So it’s not clear whether being more comfortable with selecting an object and then performing an action on it is innately easier for humans, or just what we’ve been conditioned to from using word processors, spreadsheets, or even GUI based file explorers.

But if you look at command line usage, it’s the opposite. Every command first requires you to stare the command, and then the object to act on.

I first type cd and then the folder I want to change directory to, compared to selecting the folder and then hitting enter/CMD+O/double clicking ont he GUI.

But people who have used both the GUI and CMD line rarely ever find the order of operation to be a concern for them, so I suspect the object-verb verb-object difference in vim is just a matter of convenience.

I do woodworking and construction work. In real life, I always must select first. Apply action second. So to me this feels more natural.

I think you’re overestimating how well real life actions map to the object/verb dichotomy.

So you’d say that it’s object first because you first get the wood and saw and then decide to saw the wood with it.

I could argue it’s verb first because you first GET the wood and saw.

I’m not saying that I’m right and you’re wrong. In fact, quite the opposite. My point is that I don’t think real life actions can be broken cleanly into object-verb or verb-object, in the first place.

"I need to GET something. I know, I'll GET some WOOD."

"I need some WOOD. I think I'll GET some WOOD."

I think this supports the point - in either case the syntax for the action is 'get wood'.

This whole back and forth in this subthread is ridiculous. People are comparing command syntax (not even a proper PL) with natural language syntax. First one is used to define actions first and foremost, and the second one to describe them.

How we formulate our actions in our head/speech to describe them is mostly irrelevant here.

I have an almost entirely non-visual imagination and internal narrative. Vi and then vim were pretty easy to adopt, and it’s still easy for me to learn new editor-as-a-language functionality. I started using it in the 90s and only figured out the visual stuff in the past few years (for block editing).

That is maybe the key point here. I am the total opposite of you. A friend of mine is like you and he thrives in vim.

I think it's a wonderful thing that the IT ecosystem has created such a variety of different tool methodologies converging on the same purpose. It seems analogous to convergent evolution in biology.

> "[verb] the [noun]" is pretty natural

For an English speaker. There are many human languages that put the verb at the end of clauses. Japanese is one example.

It is pretty common nowadays in functional programming languages to find operators which reverse the order of application or composition, so rather than writing f(g(h(x))) one can instead write “x |> h |> g |> f”. This style is quite popular, which leads me to believe that many people prefer object-action over action-object in same way. (Although perhaps this is more a critique of action-object-object vs object-action-action)

While you didn't refer to any explicit programming language (so your example is correct by definition), I think you may have mixed up something. The order is reversed, but typically not in the way you describe. For your example of f(g(h(x))), you would write (f . g . h) x in Haskell. So for this particular example, the syntactical order is not reversed.

However, you could say the natural order of reading is reversed: The naive way to read (f . g . h) might be "first f, then g, then h", opposite the actual order of execution.

This x |> h |> g |> f syntax is Elixir (and F# perhaps? and surely other langs). In Haskell this is written

  x & h & g & f

And in shell script, this is written

  echo x | h | g | f

This operator is sometimes called the pipeline operator

Anyway, here is some ghci session exemplifying the usage of the & operator

  $ ghci
  λ import Data.Function((&))
  λ a f g h x = x & h & g & f
  λ b f g h x = (f . g . h) x
  λ c = f g h x = f (g (h x))
  λ a (+ 1) (* 2) (+ 3) 1
  9
  λ b (+ 1) (* 2) (+ 3) 1
  9
  λ c (+ 1) (* 2) (+ 3) 1
  9

It's unfortunate that this is named & in Haskell and not |>. And what's worse, it's not in the prelude.

to be honest, idiomatic code in haskell-land tends to be written right-to-left and not left-to-right, so you'd usually write it with the ($) and (.) operators. I personally have gotten used to reading it right to left more, as have probably most people who use haskell extensively. And I think it's only fair that haskell chose a 1 character operator: composing functions and applying them to arguments is the main way to make programs, so it's good that you have to type the least amount characters possible to do it, compared to something like F# where all the function composition and application operator take two characters (|>, <|, >>, <<)

I recently started using (&) a lot (e.g. `something arg1 arg2 & liftIO`) and frankly I think it's fantastic for readability, especially with adaptors like `liftIO` or `void` in `do` blocks. The relevant information is up front in a consistent position in the block; the adaptor is only even noticeable when I actually read the line - rather than being something I need to semi-consciously ignore. I also sometimes use it for chains of pure function application when the alternative is to read bottom-to-top or use where/let bindings with arbitrary names.

`import "flow" Flow` gives you (|>) = ($), (<|) = (&), (<.) = (.) and (.>) (by analogy). I slightly wish it were part of base - the symbols are much more intuitive, and I think that's important for increasing adoption - but I tend not to use it because it's non-standard. Most potential/plausible Haskell users, after all, haven't used Haskell at all, let alone extensively. Such people need to be taken seriously in decision making processes even though they almost necessarily have no voice.

I don't think the number of characters is at all relevant to the decision though: being non-surprising and understandable are far more important than using one vs two chars which in this case pull in both directions and I reckon the balance lies with sticking to the standard.

I'm assuming they were talking about Elixir, which uses that syntax to pipe the result of the left side into the first argument of the function on the right side. The transformation was correct in Elixir, and I can confirm that I at least do think that way.

“Go to the store” is the action and “I’m” is the object, so your example supports the Kakoune case not the Vim case

(These are also English-specific justifications)

Lots of Asian languages have the nouns before verbs.

Whenever you say words “natural”, or “friendly” you actually mean “what I am used to”. As the saying goes “Basically, the only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.” (Usenet discussion about Apple Macintosh).

So, no, I spent couple of years struggling with non-modal editors, where I had that feeling all the time “I have no idea how to do it effectively in this $EDITOR, while I know five keypresses which would do it for me in vim.” Finally, I have liberated myself and switched back to vim.

Irrelevant nit, but:

> “Basically, the only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.”

The nipple is not intuitive for everyone.

One of our children struggled mightily with the nipple and we had a miserable two or three months of breastpumping and finger-feeding before he finally figured it out.

He later corrected it by saying:

> There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It's all learned.

Following-up on irrelevancy: what made you stick? We had the same experience, but gave up after 6 weeks because breastpumping was exhausting, and switched to bottles and artificial milk which our daughter loved immediately.

I think the belief (based on what evidence we're aware of) that breast milk is genuinely better for babies.

My wife and I are both sort of gluttons for punishment if we're convinced something is the right path.

Yeah, just wait until he gets to VIM in a few years.

Just an FYI Kakoune is a modal editor. I've actually tried it and OP has a point, for many of the things that you would use visual mode in vim things are very natural in Kakoune. It's also surprisingly accessible to someone used to vim. That said, it's difficult to leave the huge community behind vim behind.

If your brain prefers that order, you can emulate it in vim by doing v-movement-action, for example viwd to first select an inner word and then delete it.

I tend to do that whenever I'm unsure what my action will actually affect. Pressing one more key is a price I can pay.

I do exactly this when I'm doing complex commands and want to select-verify-run. Most commonly, something like vi(c where I want to confirm how the parentheses are nested before the operation.

I found that over the years, my Vim habits have naturally moved in an "object-action" sort of direction using visual mode. I think a lot of other Vim users end up doing the same.

When I tried Kakoune for a few days, I found it difficult to adapt to the differences, but that's probably to be expected no matter what. One thing I particularly missed was g-v ("restore previous visual mode selection"), which I use constantly in Vim. There's a good chance it's doable, though, and I just didn't figure it out.

Vim uses both models, it uses the object-action model in visual mode.

> The way vim works is actually the opposite of what your brain wants, this is one of the reasons why learning vim tricks is hard.

Do you mean that you think "word change" instead of "change word"? To me this sounds like you have been programming in Java-like languages for too long :)

Strategy Pattern Change Factory get instance word

You forgot the factory that builds the factory that builds the factory to call get on. I’m sure you’ll need a StringBuilder or two too! ;)

So Kakoune is like RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), and Vim is like Polish Notation then?

For sure any user of RPN would agree that it makes more sense to type the operation after the object. Not sure how that translates to modal text editing though.

Are you making a general claim that the brain prefers object-action syntax vs action-object, or just in text editor commands?

I think the only general claim that could be made is that the brain prefers to be certain of what's going to happen/what did happen. To get that you either need to have a good feel for where a motion is going to end up (which is harder the more inexperienced you are, and the more complex/farther the motion), or to get feedback.

Personally, I also struggle with a relatively high rate of accidental (or mis-registered) key presses, or being in the wrong mode, which means that even if I have high confidence in constructing the right command in my head, my confidence in the right command being executed is significantly lower, and direct, always-on feedback thus feels enormously helpful to me.

I suspect your hunch about object-action way brains work is very narrow and will not hold if extrapolated outside the western culture. My suspicion is based on a belief in [Sapi-Whorf hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#:~:text=....). The need to reach of the object first is a very English specific language constraint afaik.

Before I finished reading your first sentence, I knew you are a Kakoune evangelist.

object-action may be a more natural order in some languages. I use a language which permits both. So I think you're overstating how much of a deal it is. That said, Kakoune has controversial design choices in a couple of areas:

  * no explicit select mode means not only you're selecting text all the time as you move your cursor (which can be annoying). More importantly, it means there are very few keys left on the keyboard for user defined commands. This comes up all the time on the forums whenever someone asks for a new function or an unused leader key. "Fewer modes" is not a virtue in itself, because modes have other benefits like taking the weight off keyboard.
  * Shell as a scripting language. Really. It's completely awful for maintainability.
  * I continue to argue that multi-cursors are a poor man's search&replace. It doesn't show off-screen matches by default, so you don't know if you're matching anything off-screen or not.

There are Kakoune features I like very much, for example improved integration with commandline utilities. You can more easily use them to process the text inside editor.