Most programming languages are line-oriented and Vim’s visual-line mode suits this very well. In Vim I can press V and then j three times and I will have selected three whole lines for acting upon. In Emacs I have to first move to the beginning of the line with C-a , then start selecting with C-SPC , then go down three lines by pressing C-n three times, and finally press C-e C-f to move to a position such that three complete lines are selected. This is uncomfortable.

Lots of Emacs users use kill-whole-line to kill a line without it mattering whether your cursor is at the beginning or in the middle of that line. I don’t find this comfortable, I think because I don’t want to choose whether I’m doing a line-wise or character-wise selection until after I’ve starting highlighting my selection. I want to expand my selection to take up the beginning and ends of the lines. This feels like an operation similar to what expand-region.el does. The following piece of advice makes one’s er/expand-region keybinding expand one’s character-wise selection into something of a line-wise selection, provided you haven’t use expand-region to make the current selection. So it takes you from this:

?expandregionlines1.png

to this:

?expandregionlines2.png