[cmrdporcupine]

vi/vim users everywhere gonna love this one:

"He also eliminated the different typing modes which plagued the early word processors. With other products, if you were typing new text at the end of a document, you had to be in a Create mode. If you typed in the middle, you had to be in an Edit mode. In an Edit mode, your typing would erase existing text, so to insert text, you had to change to an Insert mode. Alan allowed the user to type anywhere in the document without a mode change"

[TeMPOraL]

If it worked at s-expression level rather than character level, it would make total sense! Editing and inserting are different phases.

And of course it's trendy writers' advice today to do not mix writing with editing. Create vs. Edit mode embodied that before it was popular.

[CoastalCoder]

I use neovim, but I actually really prefer the Wordstar-like editing model (same/similar to Word Perfect's?).

You'd think that would push me towards emacs, but I just get the sense that neovim has a more active community.

[cmrdporcupine]

Emacs is probably more active than ever.

But it's a whole thing. Ends up being a whole all-encompassing world view. It's my preferred editor, and I love and have memorized the default key bindings and window management years ago... but I also ... have a love hate thing with it. Something always needs tweaking and it takes so long to start.