[Lapel2742]

>Sometimes that means having a side panel.

I do not even need that. Modal editing is enough to keep me away from all the VI clones. I hate it with a passion.

I have a fully customized Emacs that I use for anything Lispy and it's great for that purpose but everything else is just "ok".

I try to use Zed but since it is a commercial offering it is just a matter of time until it gets entshitified too.

Vscode is/was really good but it seems to get worse and it's Microsoft.... I run out of editors it seems.

[torben-friis]

Honest question, what is it that you hate about modal editing?

[Lapel2742]

> Honest question, what is it that you hate about modal editing?

It's annoying. I'm fine with being in one mode. I'm fine with selecting 7 lines and typing "whatever". I hate "7ddiwhatever<esc>".

And yes, it may be the case that you are faster in VI(m) than I am in (choose the editor) but that doesn't matter. For me speed of typing is never critical.

[rrgok]

I tried Helix and Kakoune too. They all have the same problems.

First. It adds friction. Every damn time I need to write, I forget to enter insert mode. You have no idea how many times I ended up with a strange buffer. Hopefully there is undo. But it gets boring fast. I need to write as soon I enter the editor. I don't need to move the cursor to read the text that visible on the current page.

Second, how the hell I'm supposed to make small movements when I'm in insert mode, with the arrow keys? Like move cursor to the left by 3 chars. Do I enter normal mode, press l 3 times. Or delete the whole word and rewrite it?

Third. Why some movements are symbols? Like, line ending is $. Beginning of line is 0. so much so for home row movements.

Fourth. Could never remember if f or t includes the char I'm looking for.

Fifth. How cumbersome is to press ESC on the top left corner every damn time. Yes, there exists Ctrl+[. But still. So much so - again - homerow movement.

Not directly related to modal editing.

Sixth. I could not make copy/paste work reliably in remote a linux server from a Windows machine via SSH. Hell, I could not make it work with WSL2.

Sevent. Debuggers sucks. There is no comparison to JetBrains Debugger GUI. Not even VSCode come close to it.

Sorry for the rant.

[skydhash]

The rant is fine. I'll just provide some explanation.

First: Vim comes from vi, which is a visual mode for ex, which is a supercharged version of ed, which is (the standard editor) a line editor. With ed, you don't really write, you issue commands that does things to the file. Think of the file as a long roll of paper and the program as an assistant. So a command could be "replace your on line 14 with you're" or "delete line 34 to 45". Ex added more commands, Vi made it interactive, and Vim added even more features (syntax highlighting, scripting, location list,...). But still the same mode of interaction remains. The cursor is what you control. It's not just an indicator where the next character will appear or be deleted. It's the starting point of more powerful interactions.

Second. You're not supposed to move the cursor that much in insert mode. For 3 characters to the left, I just backspace and rewrite. For more, I go to normal mode and use F, f, T, or t which will land me to the character I want. Then I can use something like x (delete character) or r (replace character) without having to enter insert mode. There's a lot of movement beside hjkl, and I rarely uses h or l for things that further away than two characters.

Third. There's not a lot of key on the keyboard. $ is end of line in most regex dialect, ^ is beginning of line which would be actually the first character, but most people would assume it's the first non-whitespace character, so that's how they went. In C, curly braces mark blocks of code, so it's a small leap to use it for blocks of text, aka paragraphs.

Fourth. My mnemonics are f (find) and t (to). The latter does not include the character.

Firth. A lot of people remaps the caps lock to either Ctrl or ESC.

Sixth. They're different computers so there's no shared clipboard. Sharing information between the clipboard can be done using escape sequences, but I've never bother to. I just maximize the current buffer so I can use the terminal selection. And if I wanted more than a screen (dmesg), I'd pipe the command to a file and then download that file with sftp.

Seventh. Jetbrains only have debuggers for a handful of programming languages while `printf` is universal. And there's no law forbidding installing an IDE alongside your editor.

[torben-friis]

I think if you google ADM-3A terminal keyboard you'll see half your issues explained :)

There's a ton of historical baggage there. Thankfully, a bit of it can be resolved by setting esc and/or ctrl in caps lock.