Re: Understanding Word Boundaries

[Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

On 6/16/2010 11:44 AM, Paul Drummond wrote:

> Again, vim does the right thing here - pressing 'b' takes the point to
> the closing bracket of Page(this) so it doesn't recognise the semi-colon
> as a bracket which is intuitive and what I would expect.  This is really
> the point I am trying to make.  I have never taken the time to
> understand the behaviour of word boundaries in Vim because *it just
> works*.  In Emacs I am forced to think about word boundaries because
> Emacs keeps surprising me with its weird behaviour!

I never thought about this issue actively.  I do have a vague recollection of 
facing it when I first moved back from vi to Emacs.

Separating words and word boundaries feels more semantic and less mechanical. 
And it seems that you can get more done with the same key binding than we 
currently can.  Seems like a good idea to implement it:

   forward-word-or-boundary, kill-word-or-boundary, ...

My example would be, say "apples, oranges and peaches".  Now think of deleting 
"apples, ".

Cheers,
Uday