I've been trying to understand Vim recently. I can see how comfortable it can be to navigate codebases, keep fingers on home row. Of course by not using physical ESC but Ctrl+] or jj/jk and having swappped Ctrl with Caps Lock. And of course with using leader key and not reaching for Shift+: to enter commands. I was playing with AstroVim with many plugins preinstalled and honestly I'm not interested in writing Lua scripts at all. Please don't tell me I'm not "target user of NeoVim", because it's like saying water is wet or stones are solid. Highest possible configurability is already possible in Emacs which I'm more inclined to pursue using lisp language inside live programmable environment.
To the point: isn't modal editing overrated and actually universal? Pressing caps lock moves editor into "caps lock mode", shift/ctrl/alt/cmd lifts editor into shortcuts mode, pressing ModKey+F transitions into search mode etc. In Vim in normal mode I actually keep my left pinky on Ctrl (caps lock) key while with my index fingers I create chords with d/u/f/b to navigate. Pinky fatigue was meant to be a selling point of ergonomics of Vim motions, but it's actually not gone. Ergonomics can be even better realised with ergonomic keyboard, thumbs clusters and keyboard level programmable layers. I'm very comfortable in VSCode using Emacs keybingins plus my custom ones which allow me to not leave home row do to anything I need.
If it comes to smart selection inside word, paragraph, fn body etc - it's better handled by plugins like treesitter which actually understands AST without different ant algorithms crawling characters in unknown to me ways and trying to find edges.
One thing which you can argue is superior in modal editing is commands accumulation where you press 'd' and subsequent keystrokes build up a command waiting to be executed with a final key. This of course is powerful, but not discoverable and with no undo when you make a mistake. All accumulated keystrokes can't be reified (seen as an object) so they can't be further programmed. It's flat abstraction meant to be used in one certain way. Things which would be more interesting is search inside search on arbitrarly deep level with undo, backtracking, taking other branch with keeping previous branch etc. All this is more similar to Smalltalk actually.
Can anyone confirm or deny the modal editing had high meaning in early days of teletypes where it was easier to send single keys instead of chords?
Anyway, I have impression the (n)vim is great attention sink on which you can spend weeks/months/years and get amazing proficiency and reach some local maximum, but in general it's nothing different from what we had elready long time ago in 1976.
Yes, I know popular youtubers (especially THE most popular one) talking about vim and I've seen what they do with their fingers.
I'd like also to apologize for unorganized shape of this post, it's brain dump spanning different subjects. I also don't consider myself a power user of (n)vim at all.
Please don't try to bite me for criticism, I have intention to understand ideas underlying different editors and how to progress creating the next editor of course taking best features of all already existing ones. (n)vim is an amazing effort and made life of many people just better by not having to use popular editor of the year which can get destroyed by corporate incentives.
