I hope I didn't unintentionally convey that modal editing isn't "interesting"! Rather, I think it's "nonobvious", and needed historical contingency to get its foot in the door. Then the question becomes "once it was known and valued, how come people didn't iterate on it in the same way they did chords or editing DSLs or other features?"
Have you looked at Helix at all? I think it has an essentially better editing paradigm than vim does, but I stick with Neovim because I really like writing my own plugins.
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I hope I didn't unintentionally convey that modal editing isn't "interesting"! Rather, I think it's "nonobvious", and needed historical contingency to get its foot in the door. Then the question becomes "once it was known and valued, how come people didn't iterate on it in the same way they did chords or editing DSLs or other features?"
Have you looked at Helix at all? I think it has an essentially better editing paradigm than vim does, but I stick with Neovim because I really like writing my own plugins.