> I was more trying to convey the idea that the way of thinking was different. Instead of concentrating on the immediate motion of the cursor, I'm concentrating on the structure of the document.
In what way does the multiple selection model not concentrate equally on the structure of the document? It's true that vim has a larger vocabulary than a typical editor, but its grammar is actually weaker. For example, I know of no way to combine two arbitrary motions.
Consider the case where you want to delete all strings containing the word die, where the string grammar is non-trivial. In a selection-based language you can
* select-all-"die", manually checking that they're inside strings
* select-enclosing-block
* delete
If one had a language-aware string token finder (and, frankly, a token-aware editor would be amazing - maybe I should edit Sublime to do that...), one could even
* select-all-string-tokens
* select-all-"die" inside selection
* select-enclosing-block
* delete
This is a very structural approach. I don't know a neat way of doing this with vim. (I'd be happy to learn I'm wrong!) There are other examples, like where one wants to work on some collection of things in lockstep and vim's inability to hold state through selections between commands results in a difficult workflow. The multiple selection model remains semantically unperturbed.
I would very much be interested in a modal editor that doesn't just try to copy vim - working on multiple selections with a large vocabulary and syntax-awareness would be wonderful. I also find some things, like temporarily restricting actions to a subset of selections, needlessly hard in Sublime. There's a lot that can be done!