[OkayPhysicist]

For a perspective that hasn't been shared all ready, I like modal editing because I A) don't like to use the mouse any more than I have to and B) have awful memory when it comes to complicated chords of keyboard shortcuts. Except for the bare basics (switching modes, jumping to the start and end of lines, etc), I heavily rely on much easier to remember names of commands to interact with my editor. Like toggling line numbering: I'm sure there's some ctrl-alt-F4 esque chord to do it in VS Code, but that'll be much harder for me to remember than :set number.

For similar reasons, I prefer the command line to GUI-based applications, that all seem to be built around either a love of clicking through a long series of cascading menus, or memorizing obtuse shortcuts. TUI applications like Vim integrate much more readily with my other command line tools, so it creates a much more seamless workflow.

[esclerofilo]

> but that'll be much harder for me to remember than :set number

You could also do Ctrl+P on VSCode (or Ctrl+Shift+A on a Jetbrains IDE) and search for "line number". Command based interfaces are no longer unique to CLI tools.