Re: Understanding Word Boundaries

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I have been an Emacs users for a few years now so definitely still a
> newbie!  While initially I struggled to control its power, I eventually came
> round.  Every issue I've had so far I've been able to fix by a quick search
> in EmacsWiki, except for one frustrating and re-occurring problem that has
> plagued me for years - word boundaries.

Emacs doesn't so much care about word-boundaries as about words.
So when you forward-word, it just skip until the end of the next word,
where "abc" is a word, but ";-( )" is not.
So in many cases, it ends up doing in one step what VI would do in to:
first skip over the non-word chars, and then skip the next few
word-chars, whereas VI would stop after the run of non-word chars and
stop again after the subsequent run of word chars.

I don't think there a very good reason for doing it like Emacs vs doing
it like VI.  Each one has its advantages.  VI's approach stops more
often, so there's less chance that it'll skip the position in which
you're interested, which is why you like it.  In Emacs's approach OTOH
you'll often get away with fewer operations.


        Stefan