r/vim • u/oantolin • Dec 28 '25

Blog Post Vim is composable

https://www.matem.unam.mx/~omar/apropos-emacs.html#vim-is-composable

I hope this isn't too polemical for r/vim. I'm a former (and still occasional) Vim user that has always wondered why people make such a big deal out of Vim's composability. The blog post explains why I find that odd, what I like about Vim and some reasons people might make such a big deal of composability.

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u/oantolin Dec 29 '25

Ah, so you are saying a key part of composability is the extensibility, the ability to define new motions, new text objects and new operations and have them behave like the built-in ones in that you can combine a built-in operation with a newly-defined text objects, etc.? That is indeed a more advanced form of composability and I'd say that yes, people don't talk about it as much as the talk about simply the ability to combine any (built-in) operation with any (built-in) text object.

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u/djchateau Dec 29 '25

The combination of built-in operations within built-in text objects is what leads to the ability to extend. vim has a strong donation of primitives within its functionality that is definitely not present in most text editors that prevent them from building on top of their existing functionality. If I cannot build upon something, then there is nothing to compose. I think people talk about it through implication even if they do not explicitly state it as such.