Yes, I agree modal editing is "nonobvious" in that sense.
I have seen Helix and probably installed it at some point, but haven't played much with it. I used to be heavily invested in finding the "one true editor" that will last me my career - played with Emacs originally, then Sublime Text 2 - that's when I first wrote some plugins for an editor. Then eventually settled on vim for a long time.
But the last five/ten years I've moved away from exploring editors and more towards a simple VSCode setup. Though, I do use a lot of heavy scripting of my computer to give me a vim-inspired keyboard anywhere I can type on the computer.
Yes, I agree modal editing is "nonobvious" in that sense.
I have seen Helix and probably installed it at some point, but haven't played much with it. I used to be heavily invested in finding the "one true editor" that will last me my career - played with Emacs originally, then Sublime Text 2 - that's when I first wrote some plugins for an editor. Then eventually settled on vim for a long time.
But the last five/ten years I've moved away from exploring editors and more towards a simple VSCode setup. Though, I do use a lot of heavy scripting of my computer to give me a vim-inspired keyboard anywhere I can type on the computer.