[0cf8612b2e1e]

Have you ever used a modal editor? It takes the smallest bit of brain training to adapt, but feels more logical for long form coding. I spend a lot more time reading code than writing. Having more tools to grep/highlight/move text in one mode is quite productive.

[magackame]

People who give vim some time split in two camps:

- how can you use a modal editor!?

- how can you use a nonmodal editor!?

[90s_dev]

I used vim for a few years about 15 years ago, yes.

It's not that it's difficult for me, it's that it's unnatural for me.

Different people's minds work differently.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

It is wild to me that you could use vim for years and not like the modal style. To each their own, I would have bounced to emacs.

[90s_dev]

I went from vim to emacs and used that for a few years, then moved to VS Code for the next 10 years or so. It's showing its age a bit lately, so I'm sure I'll try another one soon, which is why I looked at Helix. But I'm very glad there are very different editors for very different types of minds, just like how there are different ways to indent/format code. Programmers do not have one-size-fits-all minds, and we shouldn't design anything assuming they do/should. (Looking at you, Golang.)

[iLemming]

For some reason Emacs veterans keep waging wars against modality without acknowledging that Emacs is inherently modal - key chords create temporary modes, transient keymaps maintain states, the minibuffer is a distinct mode, and even fundamental concepts like the mark-active state and recursive editing demonstrate that Emacs has always embraced context-dependent behavior rather than being truly modeless.

[aquariusDue]

Oh, wow. I really enjoy modal editors, especially the Kakoune model seen in Helix and meow-mode for Emacs but I could never put it into words why I actually preferred them.

Yep, that's precisely it.