Have you ever used a modal editor? It takes the smallest bit of brain training to adapt, but feels more logical for long form coding. I spend a lot more time reading code than writing. Having more tools to grep/highlight/move text in one mode is quite productive.
I went from vim to emacs and used that for a few years, then moved to VS Code for the next 10 years or so. It's showing its age a bit lately, so I'm sure I'll try another one soon, which is why I looked at Helix. But I'm very glad there are very different editors for very different types of minds, just like how there are different ways to indent/format code. Programmers do not have one-size-fits-all minds, and we shouldn't design anything assuming they do/should. (Looking at you, Golang.)
For some reason Emacs veterans keep waging wars against modality without acknowledging that Emacs is inherently modal - key chords create temporary modes, transient keymaps maintain states, the minibuffer is a distinct mode, and even fundamental concepts like the mark-active state and recursive editing demonstrate that Emacs has always embraced context-dependent behavior rather than being truly modeless.
Oh, wow. I really enjoy modal editors, especially the Kakoune model seen in Helix and meow-mode for Emacs but I could never put it into words why I actually preferred them.
