I was just watching Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk and thus learned about Larry Tesler. He says Larry Tesler dedicated his life to removing modes from software back where was no such thing as modeless editing. Perhaps this is why.
I watched the talk and was caught off guard by his mention of Larry Tesler. I can understand why because that did usher an era of easier to use text editors.
However, I'd like to emphasize that there is always a place for tools that are sufficiently complex such that it allows the craftsman wield it proficiently. Past a certain point of simplification, a tool would lack the necessary vocabulary to express things succinctly. Like why Jargon is necessary sometimes.
However, I think Vim is fundamentally a finite state machine. While complex, once you grok the mental model of how it works, everything else comes quite naturally. So fear not.
I find it interesting that emacs is basically the modeless Vim. I imagine that there are modes involved, but chorded input is basically modeless. I wonder if it makes a difference to the craftsman. Perhaps I should learn emacs to understand the difference.
I'm currently going in sort of the other direction. I'm usinge evil-mode which is VIM implemented in Emacs. Emacs does have many of the powerful features of VIM but what it lacks are composable commands. So what in Emacs would take NxM separate commands can be supported in VIM/Evil-mode with N edit commands and M movement commands (not to mention the modifiers like (i)nside or (a)around). I find myself intuitively using combos ive never used before, it just makes sense that they would work whereas I would have had to learn them individually in Emacs. What Emacs has that VIM lacks is it's amazing customisability, I love switching to scratch and changing how my editor works on the fly, I also totally rely on Org-mode along with my customisations of it (I even use it to generate my website!). I'm sure it's not for everyone and I wouldn't recommend it to someone without Emacs, or at least VIM, experience but for me Evil-mode really feels like the best of both worlds.
(commenting from my phone so please excuse weird autocorrect thingies)
you don't need modes for richness of expression and complexity- Modal errors can mystify even the most experienced of users- and waste vast amounts of time while you're learning to use VIM. Emacs is really no better. Sublime Text 2 is as close to modeless as I've seen, but there's still a long way to go.
