basic navigation

[Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com>]

***** basic navigation and killing
i am wondering if there are packages that can do this kind
of thing better.

this applies to any editing.  here is an example.  suppose i
am on an org-mode heading, with point at ^.

never mind the actual text.  my goal is to transform it to
this.

   *** ^gather and do physical

so i do the first thing that comes to mind: c-backspace
which runs backward-kill-word in my emacs 27.1.

there are of course many other things i can do, instead,
such as go to bol, use delete-char, etc., but i want to
illustrate basic word killing with this example.  what
occurs is this, successively.

   *** --- /various to do/ and to ^gather and do physical
   *** --- /various to do/ and ^gather and do physical
   *** --- /various to do/ ^gather and do physical
   *** --- /various to ^gather and do physical

i don't particularly mind the command's ignorance of org
syntax here.

   *** --- /various ^gather and do physical
   *** --- /^gather and do physical

and then once more to get rid of the --- syntax, which is a
bit of an emacs editing disaster.  what i wanted was to have
it produce what i set out to do.  maybe naive, but i wonder
if there might be different killing/nav paradigms.

i've been vexed by this since the 1980s with only sporadic
attempts to see if i can improve on it.  time to rely on
others for some ideas and possible existing packages.
please be gentle with me.  am cognitively impaired.

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