personally i just find verb noun editing a tiny bit more fun than noun verb.

you craft an incantation that either does everything right or backfires. there’s no feedback while said incantation is being constructed.

practically, noun verb is much better of course.

I think noun-verb is worse; I'm unsure where the idea comes from that Helix's (or Kakoune's) editing model is better. Bear with my short rant. :-)

I don't want or need pre-emptive visual feedback on every keystroke, because it's a tool I use every day. I want an editing language that allows me to develop a mental model of it, so that I can _avoid_ round-tripping most edit actions visually. The primary advantage of the Vi editing language has never been speed (though that tends to be a secondary one), it's that it saves you from thinking about editing. Visual feedback also adds noise; it's especially distracting when you're moving around reading code. It's not an automatic win except when you're learning. Finally, if I really need it, I'm using a modal editor! I can simply switch into visual mode for complex edits. That's the modal solution.

And in exchange for (ime, annoying) visual feedback I have to give up things like the repeat last edit '.' key, and operator pending mode (see :omap), and more... which isn't palatable to me. Of course, everyone works differently; different strokes. But it's not obviously better, in a lot of ways.

I _am_ envious of the complete default configuration Helix has. Though it seems like that's planned from Neovim in the near future, alongside multicursor (filed under 'super macros'), looking at their roadmap.