Advantages of "selection mode" over Kakoune-like "select by default"?

[malte-v]

I'm considering moving from Kakoune over to pepper, but one thing that bugs me is the separate "selection mode" with the blue cursor. I feel like it consistently requires more or the same number of keystrokes compared to vi or Kakoune.

Here's an example: I'm at the beginning of the line

map-command <c-e> <c-p>

in normal mode and I want to change command to insert. Here's how I would do it with vi/kakoune/pepper:

• vi: eece
• kakoune: eeec
• pepper: wwawi

Is five keystrokes the best pepper can do in this situation or have I missed the point of the separate "selection mode"?

[vamolessa]

Well, I really did not design the default bindings/editing primitives trying to beat vim or kakoune. Instead my goal was to settle on a very minimal and orthogonal set of primitives that compose. You can see that the list here is pretty small: https://github.com/vamolessa/pepper/blob/master/pepper/rc/bindings.md

So I decided to take the hit of typing a little bit more in some cases. Note that kakoune has a lot of <alt-something> bindings for the 'something' vs 'something-but-expanding-the-selection' which was one thing I didn't like when using that editor.

Hope you can understand the reasoning.

[malte-v]

If minimalism is your explicit goal, I think you reached it :) I'd rather have a larger set of editing primitives that fully make use of the keyboard and enable me to edit text more efficiently, but clearly we have different goals here.