What Vim features are missing in Emacs with Viper and Vimpulse?

Alexey Romanov picture Alexey Romanov · Nov 29, 2008 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

There are important features of Emacs which are missing in Vim, such as the comint mode, and there are no scripts/plugins which can replace them.

There are also benefits of Vim over Emacs, such as modal editing and generally better default shortcuts. However, Viper mode gets me both. Vimpulse also enables visual mode. Unfortunately, no mode can make Emacs work as fast as Vim.

So I mostly learned Vim-in-Emacs. What Vim features am I missing?

Answer

Michael picture Michael · Dec 1, 2008

I'm a regular vim user but not an emacs user and haven't used vimpulse to confirm this.

But browsing the vimpulse code below I see no mention of text objects.

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/vimpulse.el

Vim introduced some very useful idioms for selection and movement that aren't in regular vi

  • cat 'cut around tag' for xml/html tags
  • diw 'delete in word'
  • di( di" delete text within a "" () etc.

in the vim help see :he text-objects for more.