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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the “vi way” is to get out of insert mode as quickly as possible. You hit esc as son as you stopped typing and paused to think.

I love vim, but vi is too spartan for me.

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In my view the "vi way" is to forget about a insert as a mode and instead, treat i(nsert) and a(ppend) as commands, with the to be inserted string as an argument, terminated by <esc>.

That’s a good way to put it

This is how TECO worked explicitly. The general operation syntax is

    [count] command [argument ESC]

I have never seen direct confirmation that vi commands were modelled on TECO, but they seem too similar for it be entirely coincidence.

One consequence of this in nvi (& IIRC vi) you can do <n>i<txt><esc> to repeat <txt> <n> times, just as you can repeat most any command with prefixing it with a count.

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