[marssaxman]

Modal editing did come first, and universally agreed upon better things did evolve afterwards. I remember "modes are bad" being established UI-design wisdom as long ago as the mid-'80s, after the Macintosh came out and everyone started moving toward graphical interfaces. I'm surprised there is anything about this question which is seen as being open to debate here in 2013.

[JulianWasTaken]

No. It didn't. The first editors were not modal.

And no, universally agreed upon better things did not evolve afterwards. I have no idea what the numbers are, but Vim is immensely popular amongst developers and I would highly suspect more popular amongst experienced developers than any editor whose name isn't emacs.

You are deluding yourself if you think that the modern world uses modal editors because their ancestors had keyboards that were too cramped.