design.asciidoc: Add a section describing normal mode as a text editing language

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Maxime Coste 2017-12-14 09:24:31 +11:00
parent 969f416027
commit 43d2e12c0e

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@ -111,7 +111,26 @@ things easier to understand, bugs easier to fix, and code easier to change.
When Kakoune tries to be smart, it should provide the alternative, 'non
smart' version (+\*+ tries to detect word boundaries on the selection, but
+alt-*+ permits to avoid this behavior).
Unified interactive use and scripting
-------------------------------------
As both an effect of Orthogonality and Simplicity, normal mode is *not*
a layer on top of a text editing language layer (normal mode keys are
*not* bound to text editing commands), normal mode *is* the text editing
language.
That means there is no +delete-selected-text+ command that +d+ is bound
to, +d+ *is* the +delete selected text+ command.
This permits to have scripting use case and interactive use cases share
the same text editing language. Both use normal mode to express complex
edition.
Besides promoting simplicity by avoiding the introduction of another
layer, this helps ensure the interactive editing language is as expressive
as possible as we need to make it able to handle complex use cases,
such as indentation hooks.
Language agnostic
-----------------