Broken behavior of x and delete key in evil mode

[kepi]

I just switched yesterday to develop spacemacs and found out that x key is working wrong (= not like in Vim) and same is for delete key.

After some digging I think this change was introduced by commit 84ad24f which originates from pull request #2649

I believe this is bug and not intended behavior.

[kepi]

Looks like my digging was wrong one :) Reverting that commit doesn't fix issue.

[syl20bnr]

What behavior do you get ?

It seems to behave correctly here, x deletes the current char, X the previous char.

Since delete does not work as well in your configuration then there must be something that modifies the functions called by evil and delete.

SPC h d k or C-h k then enter x or delete, gives me:

• x in normal state is bound to evil-delete-char with no advice
• delete is insert state is bound to delete-char again with no advice

[cpaulik]

I'm not sure if this is what @kepi meant but I just noticed a difference between master and develop which is strange.

Press $ in develop and the cursor will move beyond the last character in the line and x will not delete anything.
Doing the same on master puts the cursor on the last character and x will delete this character.

[syl20bnr]

@cpaulik see #2525

[cpaulik]

@syl20bnr Thanks, I did not see this discussion

[kepi]

In vim and also in emacs with evil mode (and I belive in production spacemacs too) if I press x it deletes first current character, than characters after the cursor and than start deleting characters before. Better than to explain, this gif shows correct behavior:

[cpaulik]

So this is related to the evil-move-beyond-eol setting since it does not delete backwards from the last character if this is set.

(setq evil-move-beyond-eol nil) should solve this issue until a decision in #2525 is reached.

[kepi]

Thanks @cpaulik ! With reverting variable back to nil it works as it should.

As long as it would be documented in changelog or upgrade notes, it is probably ok even if I personally dislike it.

@syl20bnr if this is what you intended than you can probably close this issue. It will just be really good to put some big notice somewhere :)

[syl20bnr]

This is something to fix when beyond-eol is set to t. Spacemacs is not only Vim it is also Emacs and being able to move behind the last character of a line is very important in Emacs.
I'll try to get $ and x fixed beyond eol.

[syl20bnr]

duplicate of #2525

[StreakyCobra]

evil-mode-beyond-eol has been set back to nil in 41459be. This solve this issue, and is coherent with vim behaviour. If evil-move-beyond-eol is set, then it's normal that it's not behaving like in vim anymore.

evil-move-beyond-eol, x (evil-delete-char) and $ (evil-end-of-line) are all native evil function, so if someone don't like this behaviour it should probably be reported upstream.

I'm closing this issue then, but feel free to open a new one in case of troubles with this. I'm also open to discussion if someone think it's not solved and should be reopened ☺️