I'm playing with Meow recently. Although I don't think I'll switch to it from Evil eventually (more on that later), one of its design philosophy does make some sense: it encourages Noun-Verb text editing with visual feedback.
What does this mean?
For example, in Vim/Evil, to delete a s-exp, we usually do da). This is an example of Verb-Noun text editing, as d is the verb for deleting, and a) is the noun representing "a parentheses".
In Meow, on the other hand, with the QWERTY "default" layout, the corresponding key sequence is .rs, where
.(meow-bounds-of-thing)- Activate the outer-thing prefix
r- Round, that is, parentheses. At this point, the smallest s-exp around the cursor is selected and highlighted.
s(meow-kill)- Delete the highlighted region.
s can be other actions, like i for inserting before the region, a for inserting after the region, etc.
Noun-Verb Text Editing for the Poor Evil Emacsen
Actually Vim/Evil allows Noun-Verb text editing out of the box.
Yes, it's just the visual state. The equivalent key sequence to the above example is va)d. We also have the visual feedback, because it's, well, visual.
Moreover, inserting before the region / after the region actually also works. We just need to use I and A instead of i and a.
Improved Evil Noun-Verb Text Editing
If we compared va)d to .rs, clearly our evil solution involves an extra key input, that is v to enter the visual state.
But we are in Emacs, hacking this is pretty easy:
(defun my-evil-inner-thing () (interactive) (evil-visual-char) (set-transient-map evil-inner-text-objects-map)) (defun my-evil-outer-thing () (interactive) (evil-visual-char) (set-transient-map evil-outer-text-objects-map)) (evil-define-key* 'normal 'global "," #'my-evil-inner-thing) (evil-define-key* 'normal 'global "." #'my-evil-outer-thing)
Voilà!