How true! I wonder why humans are unable to devise a society where useful change occur swiftly when necessary.
Maybe it is also a nerd thing, but I know people who will explain you some minor aspect of the thing in excruciating detail, but totally fail to give you the big idea of what this thing even does, solves, is there for etc. It is the kind of explaination that only makes sense when you are on the same level on that topic as them.
This always makes me angry. I can remember how hard it was to grasp concepts and conventions I use blindly nowadays. But back then I was not stupid, there just was a heap of things no documentation or tutorial would explain, because it would just be assumed. Remembering your own struggles is essential when creating explainations for others.
Here we have the opposite: stagnation, a lack of change. Corruption and nepotism everywhere gumming up the works. To address your point: I believe the reason we cannot devise such societies is because vested interests are more motivated and better equipped to bend the rules to their advantage. That's the whole reason to invest in anything. People want leverage to secure their positions and their possessions against external risks. A society where everyone is equal is like the beginning of a Hunger Games: a deadly rush to either grab a weapon or take cover.
Other paradigms put too many context switches between my thoughts and the changes I want to see. I do not want to take my hands off the home row to reach the cursor keys, or God forbid the mouse. I also do not want to destroy my pinkie finger with endless usage of modifier keys. So that leaves me with vi (and kakoune).
You can start it in Insert mode and you can have it stay in Insert mode as you run a single command using C-o.
There’s also a plethora of Insert mode ctrl shortcuts which are worth learning in addition to Command mode stuff.
If you’re on the emacs path you'll be able to do all the same stuff, just differently.
The major point is that terminal based software is fully keyboard driven and you can commit the shortcuts to muscle memory and compose them.
As a long time vim user I am in normal mode all of the time. When I sit down at a vim session I haven't touched in a while I press escape a few times to make sure I'm in normal mode. Then while I'm editing I am continuously typing various motion and change commands, some of which enter insert mode, and then quickly making the change before escaping back to normal mode.
Because I am in normal mode all the time (or perhaps vice versa), I spend most of my time jumping around the file and reading what is already there. Extremely rarely am I looking at a completely empty file where the only useful thing to do is start inserting text. And even then I am often typing some command to pull in text from another file or as the result of a bash command.
This is exactly why I switched from emacs to vim, after a couple of decades of emacs use. I decided I'd put up with slow editing for a few days, as I forced myself to use vim. (It was that or not type for a week or so.) After a few days of frustration, vim started to grow on me. Swearing became less frequent.
A month later, I was perhaps 75% as fast in vim as in emacs, and my hand pain had completely vanished.
And a few months after that, I noticed that I was really quite fast in vim -- certainly faster than I was in emacs -- and that the constant puzzle-solving (finding the action that required the fewest keystrokes) was intriguing.
Using emacs seems to me to be an exercise in remembering, whereas using vim is more an exercise in thinking. Part of the appeal is that this thinking does not interfere with the thinking involved in writing. It's a bit like driving a standard car: the extra cognitive demand (do I need to shift now? are the revs right yet? am I at the biting point?) seems to be handled by a different processor, and having that processor working makes the experience more enjoyable.
This. This right here is one of the best characterizations of the vim/emacs debate that I have ever heard.
It does within free markets. Universities and professiorial societies are notoriously elitist, exclusive and x-poly