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by lutusp 4865 days ago
> You speak as if modal editing came first and universally agreed upon better things evolved afterwards.

That's exactly what happened, and think before objecting, because I was there. I used vi while working for NASA during the 1970s, when mode changes made sense (it saved paper on paper terminals). Since then, it has stopped making sense.

> I know this isn't true. I know you know this isn't true. You're being highly disingenuous.

When I wrote Apple Writer in the late 1970s, I suspected it would become popular because it eliminated the modes that plagued most contemporary editors including vi. I was right -- it did. Apple Writer became a best-seller because people hadn't yet realized that modes and mode switching were pointless burdens in a era of glass terminals and extended keyboards.

I can't believe there are people who haven't learned this elementary lesson now, over 30 years later.

1 comments

> I can't believe there are people who haven't learned this elementary lesson now, over 30 years later

Why would you let something like this bother you? There are many popular text editors and IDEs in the world, and of all these myriad, there is only one popular editor that is modeful: vi. Why would you begrudge the people who prefer to do their editing modefully, a single editor that does things this way?

It's not like vi is going to corrupt the yout's of today, as the yout's are fully exposed to IDEs such as Eclipse, IDEA, Xcode, and Visual Studio, all of which are modeless, not to mention Word, Pages, Google Docs, etc.