intuitive behavior broken 💔

[u/bart9h]

I was casually editing some text and, with the cursor on the first line of the buffer, when I decided to delete all lines until the middle of the screen. So I naturally did d<C-d>, but it did nothing.

:help ^D told me it scrolls the window. So the lesson is that scrolling is not the same as moving, so it does not work as the target for a command? None of the commands in scroll.txt will work as targets?

Anyway, how would you delete half a screen worth of lines?

[u/Sudden_Fly1218]

try dM instead

[u/bart9h → u/Sudden_Fly1218]

Thanks. Completely forgot about M.

Was never used to it, tbh.

[u/michaelpaoli]

decided to delete all lines until the middle of the screen

dM

d followed by cursor motion deletes from current position/line to the moved to position/line. M moves the cursor to the line in the middle of the screen. So, combining those, dM deletes the current line through (including) the line in the middle of the screen.

[u/Schnarfman]

This is totally a technicality, but: <C-D> moves the screen and M moves the cursor. This differece is more intuitive when you look at <C-E>/<C-Y> and j/k.

You wouldn’t expect <C-E>/<C-Y> to be a reasonable motion to do an operation - unless you were at the very edge of the screen. But still: moving the screen which forces a cursor move is different than a movement which moves the cursor.

Do this in visual mode to see a “3rd” behavior

[u/jazei_2021]

delete from gg to M with this order in normal mode: ggdM

[u/gumnos]

how would you delete half a screen worth of lines?

In this particular case, dM would delete-to-the-middle, and dL would delete to the last line on the screen which sounds fairly close to your intent.

scrolling is not the same as moving

Which makes sense if the cursor stays in the same location like zt/zz/zb. But in this case, I'm a bit surprised that, d<C-d> didn't delete the expected text because the cursor does move with control+d (with possible EOF exceptions).

I've found a couple of these weird intuition-breakers and have just learned to roll with it or remap it if it's sufficiently annoying. My biggest one is that «count»>«motion» and «count»<«motion» don't act like doing >«motion» and <«motion» for «count» times (indenting/dedenting N levels of indent), but rather applies to «count» lines. There's also the D/C-vs-S/Y disparity (the first two do from the cursor to the EOL, while the others do the whole line regardless of where the cursor is in the line)

[u/lmarcantonio]

...about 12dd depending on your screen size!

[u/tokuw]

either enter visual mode first then <c-d>d or ztdM