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

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packetlost 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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JadeNB 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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JdeBP 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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chuckadams 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.