| My own contrarian and probably equally wrong take is that it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing. Yes, equally wrong. ;-) We deal with modes all of the time—when you're backing up your car, the car is in reverse mode. Microwave ovens have modes depending on what you want to cook. I use the popcorn mode on mine a lot. Anyone who've ever used a VCR knows what modes are. So having an editor with modes shouldn't be a foreign concept. But it's not just about having modes; it's how well thought out Vim is. Even though I've been using Vim for about 10 years (after trying many other editors and getting frustrated for one reason or another), I keep learning more useful things. I recently needed to edit lots of messy Markdown files for a friend. I knew macros existed but I never bothered to use them. Before I knew it, I was using a couple of macros that really cut down on the tedious work I had to do. Same thing with regular expressions—I knew about them but I had never gotten around to learning them. Combined with Vim’s composability, regular expressions gives you super powers. The other thing about Vim I've always appreciated—it's been around so long, articles and videos from 10 years ago are still relevant today. For example, back in the day, I used to watch Derek Wyatt’s Vim tutorials. Rewatching some of them today encouraged me to learn macros and regular expressions. When I recently watched this one (https://vimeo.com/15443936), where he extracts plain text out of a messy looking XML file using regular expressions, I was like I want some of that. Any software made for people who take their tasks seriously—GUI or command line—is going to have a learning curve—I think it's exaggerated for Vim. But the payoff is well worth it. I just installed Big Sur on my Mac. Everything went smoothly for me, but not everyone was so lucky. Even if I had other compatibility issues, Vim just works. As long as I have a terminal, Vim and web browser, I can be productive. |