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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever used a modal editor? It takes the smallest bit of brain training to adapt, but feels more logical for long form coding. I spend a lot more time reading code than writing. Having more tools to grep/highlight/move text in one mode is quite productive.

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People who give vim some time split in two camps:

- how can you use a modal editor!?

- how can you use a nonmodal editor!?

I used vim for a few years about 15 years ago, yes.

It's not that it's difficult for me, it's that it's unnatural for me.

Different people's minds work differently.

It is wild to me that you could use vim for years and not like the modal style. To each their own, I would have bounced to emacs.

I went from vim to emacs and used that for a few years, then moved to VS Code for the next 10 years or so. It's showing its age a bit lately, so I'm sure I'll try another one soon, which is why I looked at Helix. But I'm very glad there are very different editors for very different types of minds, just like how there are different ways to indent/format code. Programmers do not have one-size-fits-all minds, and we shouldn't design anything assuming they do/should. (Looking at you, Golang.)

For some reason Emacs veterans keep waging wars against modality without acknowledging that Emacs is inherently modal - key chords create temporary modes, transient keymaps maintain states, the minibuffer is a distinct mode, and even fundamental concepts like the mark-active state and recursive editing demonstrate that Emacs has always embraced context-dependent behavior rather than being truly modeless.

Oh, wow. I really enjoy modal editors, especially the Kakoune model seen in Helix and meow-mode for Emacs but I could never put it into words why I actually preferred them.

Yep, that's precisely it.

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