Atom-movement key theme would be more useful if it were inhibited inside comments

[bpstahlman]

I doubt I'm the only one accustomed to using delete and change operators with word and WORD text objects to edit the text of an existing comment. With the "atom-movement" key theme enabled, the results can be pretty surprising (and disconcerting). Even moving around in a comment becomes a challenge without w, W, b, B, etc. Is there a valid use case for having atom movements work within a comment? I suspect that changing/deleting to the end of a comment (or the beginning of what follows) is a much less frequent operation than changing/deleting words within a comment. Perhaps there could be an option to inhibit the atoms when point is within a comment.

[noctuid]

Maybe new commands or an option could be added, but I think the default commands should always act on atoms. For now, you could use general-predicated-dispatch (or the equivalent if you don't use general), for example, to create your own version that behaves differently in comments.

[bpstahlman]

Hmm... My reading of the relevant section in the Emacs manual leaves me nearly convinced that comments aren't considered "atoms" in the lisp sense. I get the sense that comment and code spaces are orthogonal, and that the concepts of "list" and "atom" have meaning only in the latter.

At any rate, I have atom-motions disabled for now because it makes editing comments so painful. Thanks for the suggested workaround. I'll try to look at general-predicated-dispatch (and General, more generally) when I get some free time...

[noctuid]

Here is a self contained example (general.el not needed):

(cl-defmacro general-predicate-dispatch
    (fallback-def &rest defs
                  &key docstring
                  &allow-other-keys)
  (declare (indent 1))
  "Create a menu item that will run FALLBACK-DEF or a definition from DEFS.
DEFS consists of <predicate> <definition> pairs. Binding this menu-item to a key
will cause that key to act as the corresponding definition (a command, keymap,
etc) for the first matched predicate. If no predicate is matched FALLBACK-DEF
will be run. When FALLBACK-DEF is nil and no predicates are matched, the keymap
with the next highest precedence for the pressed key will be checked. DOCSTRING
can be specified as a description for the menu item."
  ;; remove keyword arguments from defs and sort defs into pairs
  (let ((defs (cl-loop for (key value) on defs by 'cddr
                       unless (keywordp key)
                       collect (list key value))))
    `'(menu-item
       ,(or docstring "") nil
       :filter (lambda (&optional _)
                 (cond ,@(mapcar (lambda (pred-def)
                                   `(,(car pred-def) ,(cadr pred-def)))
                                 defs)
                       (t ,fallback-def))))))

(define-key lispyville-mode-map
  [remap evil-forward-word-begin]
  (general-predicate-dispatch #'lispyville-forward-atom-begin
    (lispy--in-string-or-comment-p) #'evil-forward-word-begin))

(lispy--in-string-or-comment-p) could be replaced with (lispy--in-comment-p) or whatever.