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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

I don't! That's just a dumb joke. A thing that I semi-seriously think: modal editing is not some uniquely interesting or advantageous way to navigate and edit text. A thing that I mostly-seriously think: most more recent methods for editing and navigating code are a lot better vim-style modal text editing.

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Modal editing is very efficient imo. Once you get used to it, there is no going back. Plus, in my experience, it’s much easier on the wrists in general.

But I think Vim bindings in an IDE or Vim with a LSP plugin is the killer combo.

I expected it was because of the vim crowd's belief that a small footprint is essential for some reason. I use evil mode in emacs and can't understand why vim people place arbitrary limits on themselves when emacs is a more full IDE experience that costs them very little to jump to.

I use a remote machine at work for all development. With tmux + Vim, I get persistent editor sessions with native performance.

The alternative used to be writing code over VNC (not fun!), but we’re now moving towards VS Code Remote. I don’t see myself changing to it anytime soon, though.

The only thing what makes modal editing bearable (from UX PoV) is the unlimited undo.

e.g. Would anyone take a plane that has modal cockpit buttons?

What does flying a plane have to do with editing and navigating code?

It happens me every day: I just start to type while still in command mode, and then have to press "u" a couple of times.

(But ok, thats maybe just me - thought this is a common experience, and I just wouldn't like to sit behind a pilot doing the same...)

This sort of thing has been a factor in airplane accidents - pilots becoming confused about stuff like the automation regime they're in.

This problem can be mitigated to an extent with a vim setting to change the cursor from a block to a vertical line when you enter insert mode. After using it for a bit your brain will learn to look for the vertical line before typing.

All editors are modal, just to different extents. In Notepad, if you type a letter it inserts it, unless you have some text highlighted, in which case it replaces that text. "Some text is selected" is a mode.

The big thing that classic vi got wrong with modes from a usability perspective is that changing modes is mostly invisible. In vim, however, you can configure it to change the cursor shape in different modes, and this is a pretty effective cue. (It's also the default behavior in gvim.)

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