Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance
17 hours ago
- Modal editing is a historical accident that likely wouldn't have been invented if vi didn't exist, with its unique features emerging from specific constraints like slow terminals.
- Bill Joy's vi became popular mainly because it was freely distributed with BSD Unix and standardized in POSIX, not necessarily because of modal editing.
- Modal editing allows dense packing of keyboard shortcuts through user-controlled modes, distinguishing it from contextual shortcuts in unimodal editors.
- Early editors like Bravo introduced modes as experiments, but Xerox quickly abandoned them in favor of modeless designs.
- Modal editing has remained largely confined to vi and its descendants (vim, kakoune, Helix), with limited adoption in other software tools.
- Despite its popularity today, modal editing is seen as a niche power-user feature with a high learning curve, and creating new modes is not widely supported.