Description
Hi, referring my long complain about Helix not being as good as I would want it to be I am writing this issue to clear more on what is wrong with word-wise navigation in insert mode.
assume we have this text (repeated 2-3 times to demonstrate wrapping behaviors):
println!("Hello, world!");
How it works in VS Code
|println!("Hello, world!");
println|!("Hello, world!");
println!("|Hello, world!");
println!("Hello|, world!");
println!("Hello,| world!");
println!("Hello, world|!");
println!("Hello, world!");|
and backwards:
println!("Hello, world!");|
println!("Hello, world|!");
println!("Hello, |world!");
println!("|Hello, world!");
println|!("Hello, world!");
|println!("Hello, world!");
How it looks in Helix
|println!("Hello, world!");
printl|n!("Hello, world!");
println!(|"Hello, world!");
println!("Hell|o, world!");
println!("Hello,| world!");
println!("Hello, worl|d!");
println!("Hello, world!")|;
you might think that the next step will be
println!("Hello, world!");|
but in fact it wraps to the next line and sits like this:
println!("Hello, world!");
printl|n!("Hello, world!");
and when navigating backwards it will visit different stops than when navigating forward:
println!("Hello, world!");
printl|n!("Hello, world!");
println!("Hello, world!");
|println!("Hello, world!");
println!("Hello, world|!");
println!("Hello,| world!");
println!("Hello|, world!");
println!("|Hello, world!");
println|!("Hello, world!");
|println!("Hello, world!");
whoa, that's a lot of greetings! I really hope that you can spot what I'm talking about.
from this little experiment we can conclude a few things:
- Helix's word-wise navigation does not matches VSC's one (and also vim's one but you can check that for yourself)
there are other contexts like command-line prompt when you can use Ctrl+left/right to navigate, and they're also differ, but some things (like where the stop sits, on the last char or before it) are more sensible there as well - I find VS Code's variant much more sensible and convenient
- Helix's navigation looks better backwards than forwards
- Some deeper investigation needed to determine what to do with it.
I've noticed that Ctrl+left/right uses move_prev_word_end and move_next_word_start actions, and as properly mentioned in a similar issue #2729 it should be decided what we should count as a word (and whether to use or not this ambiguous term at all)