[OhMeadhbh]

Meh. I'm not a fan of modal interfaces. But if it works for you, then knock yourself out. I appreciate the write-up here. I'll give it a try to see if I can see what the author is talking about. The overwhelming majority of code I write now is in snippets inside text documents (think Knuthian Literate Programming) so I don't know how that would work w/ the author's modal setup. But they went to the trouble of documenting it, and it seems sort of like what `vi` people are always yammering about. Seems a decent idea to try to understand it.

[iLemming]

> I'm not a fan of modal interfaces

I'm assuming you're using Emacs (otherwise why would you be commenting in this thread, right?). It's weird to hear that from an Emacs user - it's inherently a modal editor - keycords are modal, isearch is modal, repeat-mode is modal, transients are all modals with states. Evil-mode only adds some consistent "language" and structure to deal with modality, there's nothing much to it.

Idea of vim-navigation is actually pretty neat thing - absolutely beautiful, practical model. Its biggest problem is that it encapsulates some tacit knowledge - nobody can really explain the benefits of it to anyone until they try it for some time and it "clicks". I suppose just how learning to ride a bike may work differently for different people - it also takes different amount of time and effort. But once you figure it out - there's really no going back - no reason. It's very rare to meet people who've mastered it and then willingly stopped using it.

There's no conceptual difference in switching between navigation and insert modes in Vim and e.g. C-c C-c/C-d in Emacs - the only difference that you're in-between state more often, but once muscle memory trained, it becomes second nature - you don't even think about what mode you're actually in - it becomes very fluid and consistent flow state that allows you to very efficiently navigate and deal with text - with any kind of text - plain and structured.

Also, I find that mastering efficiency in Emacs using only vanilla keybindings is a bit harder than becoming a keyboard-maestro with the help of evil-mode or similar modal modes like meow. I've been working over a decade in various teams where people use Emacs, and evil-mode users typically figure out things much faster, while those sticking to native keybindings, don't even discover some great features of Emacs for years.

[OhMeadhbh]

Ack. Forgot to respond to this. Yes, valid point. I guess when you swim in the sea of modal interfaces you're used to you don't see them. It's entirely possible the reason I like emacs more than vi is I just used emacs a lot more. Also, I like that emacs starts in a mode where it prints out what you type in. I know some versions of vim did this too, but now it seems sort of random so I always hit escape i any time i start vi. Also, I do appreciate vi's keystrokes. They seem to be better thought out than emacs'. I'm sure you can modify bindings in vim by now. Not sure what you mean by C-c C-c in emacs. That's not bound to anything on my system. Are you talking about (overwrite-mode)?

Not sure I understand why vi navigation is better. I always thought emacs' arrow keys were better than escape-h,j,k or l. Much of the time I just use emacs' equivalent of leaping, ctrl-s and ctrl-r to search forward and back.