Good programming editors are designed with the idea that as you master the program, you become more precise in telling it what to do. When editing programs, the author usually applies several navigational schemes to interpret the text of the program: by structure, by syntactical elements, but geography of the screen.
To expand on this: examples of navigating by structure include moving by token / expression / definition. Examples of moving by syntax would be the search or "jedi" navigation (i.e. navigation where you enter a special mode requiring from you to type characters that iteratively refine your search results). Finally, simply moving up / down / left right by certain number of characters is the "screen geography" way.
There's no way to tell which method is better, because they apply better in different situations, however the "screen geography" method usually ends up being the worst, because it's the most labor-intensive and requires from the author to dedicate a lot of attention to achieve precision (i.e. move exactly N spaces to the left and then exactly M spaces down is very easy to get wrong, also, with larger N and M becomes really tedious).
Navigation by word is only slightly better than navigation by character, and often falls into the "screen geography" kind of navigation. It's easy to learn, it's quite universal and doesn't require understanding of the structure of the program or mastering better techniques (eg. "jedi jump"). That's not to say that it should be excluded from the arsenal -- quite the opposite, but a master programmer (in the sense of someone who writes programs masterfully) would be the one who's less reliant on this kind of navigation.
To expand on this: examples of navigating by structure include moving by token / expression / definition. Examples of moving by syntax would be the search or "jedi" navigation (i.e. navigation where you enter a special mode requiring from you to type characters that iteratively refine your search results). Finally, simply moving up / down / left right by certain number of characters is the "screen geography" way.
There's no way to tell which method is better, because they apply better in different situations, however the "screen geography" method usually ends up being the worst, because it's the most labor-intensive and requires from the author to dedicate a lot of attention to achieve precision (i.e. move exactly N spaces to the left and then exactly M spaces down is very easy to get wrong, also, with larger N and M becomes really tedious).
Navigation by word is only slightly better than navigation by character, and often falls into the "screen geography" kind of navigation. It's easy to learn, it's quite universal and doesn't require understanding of the structure of the program or mastering better techniques (eg. "jedi jump"). That's not to say that it should be excluded from the arsenal -- quite the opposite, but a master programmer (in the sense of someone who writes programs masterfully) would be the one who's less reliant on this kind of navigation.