[chuckadams]

Whereas I cut my teeth on emacs in the early 90's, so modal is what felt awkward. I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places.

I really like the composable shorthand of vim's command set though, even if the only one I have in muscle memory is <esc>:wq

[packetlost]

Honestly, there are more "modern" editors with even more intuitive flows. Helix being one. I think the ideal editor for me would be something like a mix of Helix's shortcuts with structural regexp like in vis.

[xedrac]

I tried Helix for a few weeks and found it to be less efficient overall. Now granted it's hardly fair to compare 3 weeks to 20 years, so maybe with more time I might change my mind. I really missed vim's . key to repeat the last command for example. I think the learning curve for Helix is probably better than Vim, so if you haven't learned vim, it might be worth it. The other challenge though is the ubiquitous nature of vim and vim emulation.

[JadeNB]

> I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places.

To be fair, for most values of "every other editor out there," they came after vi (if not after vim), so it's not like vi was discarding existing wisdom.

[JdeBP]

Actually, there are a number of full-screen editors that pre-dated vi. They were for mainframe operating systems, or were confined to some university or other, or were commercial products for something like CP/M made by some tiny company somewhere, and are largely forgotten; with the last magtapes or floppy discs that had copies of them long since thrown away. Unix and vi, and what escaped UCB, got remembered. But there was other stuff around.

[JadeNB]

Certainly! I was intentionally hedging my bets with 'most' in "for most values of 'every other editor out there.'" I'd still argue that, for very large values of 'most,' most editors in widespread use today came after vi.

[chuckadams]

For sure, I'm saying that vi stuck with its design rather than follow the trend of other modal editors that converged on one insert mode, and so did its follow-ups like vim.

I just tried out helix and I'm really liking the features like its single insert mode. Still taking some getting used to, since it's selection-first, not command-first, so `dd` just deletes two chars and not the line. And shift-V doesn't select lines... grr.