things.el VS objed

The current state of things is pretty underwhelming and convoluted. In 2018 I designed a system on top of thingatpt that was not married to any parser (can use regexps or use tree-sitter or anything else to build things) or to any editing style (modal vs. non-modal). I'll probably never complete it due to a lack of time/interest, but it still seems to me that what's needed is something like this, a library in the middle that could be used for any package like this. Not sure why no one else seems to see how good thingatpt could be.

things.el: https://github.com/noctuid/things.el

I've planned to use treesitter in things.el for a long time, but another package will likely become useful long before I have time to do this.

I've designed my own text object/motion system that I hope will eventually bring more "useful" composability to any Emacs user that wants it (see things), but right the implementation is buggy and incomplete.

To build on what others are saying about Emacs, if you start exploring the package ecosystem, you're going to see quite a lot of really interesting packages that are related to improving/experimenting with the UX of editing text. While I'm not endorsing anyone in particular, I think what this list does show is just how easy it is to do pretty much whatever you want in Emacs;

https://karthinks.com/software/avy-can-do-anything/

https://github.com/jyp/boon

https://github.com/clemera/objed

https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el

https://github.com/meow-edit/meow/

https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys

https://github.com/Kungsgeten/ryo-modal

https://github.com/emacsorphanage/god-mode

Emacs 29 also now has treesitter and LSP mode integration built-in, a compilation mode, a comint mode for REPLs, excellent file browsing packages (I use dired/dirvish), and a few other killer features.

Now, if what you truly dislike are "quirky editors", prepare yourself for a world of hurt because vanilla Emacs departs quite a bit from "modern" text editors. I struggled with this for a while, but eventually by buying into the paradigm, I now feel that when emacs try emulating "modern" IDE features like autocompletion, LSP, and DAP UI, I feel like it's a regression, not a progression. The point here is that you might have an "idea" of what good initial UX and lack of quirks would look like, but Emacs might change the way you think.

This looks like an interesting and valiant attempt to build something that improves on everything that came before it, but I did find the documentation lacking in clarity.

I'm experimenting with this package right now instead:

https://github.com/clemera/objed

and will wire up the keyboard shortcuts using RYO package to roll my own modal state.

3.objed:: https://github.com/clemera/objed.git

Wow. meow project looks similar to objed but with more features. These projects are inclined to modal editing but not being vim. Thank you for suggesting.

I like the semi-modal editing package objed (short for textual object editor)

This reminds me of u/clemera's objed and of versor.

There are other modal systems for emacs. You even can construct your own with https://github.com/mrkkrp/modalka and https://github.com/Kungsgeten/ryo-modal. I have done that, these packages were extremely easy to use. I had a lot of fun designing the modal regime of my dreams. There are https://github.com/LouisKottmann/emacs-baboon, https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys (and its various forks) and https://github.com/clemera/objed.

I forgot about objed! Which is another very interesting project.

I didn't fully get what your interactive piping solution is, but I found that objed has a command oddly unrelated to the rest of its codebase: objed-ipipe, which does what I imagined Howard's piper to do but more intuitively to me. Though it seems you can write piper commands out in lisp so it's probably a superset feature-wise, I just never got started learning it.

Well laid out, I fully agree. I think there is still a lot of potential to combine these two approaches in a better way, Emacs knows about many structures already but I think it could be more convenient to act on those. I tried my hand on this with objed which aims to make it easier to act/navigate on certain units (on demand or semi automatically).