Mixed feels on modal editing
I’m at a familiar stage of my cycle with Neovim. It goes something like this:
- Pick Neovim back up after some number of months or years.
- It’s so fun! Feel the power, tweak the configs, install the packages, learn some more tricks. It’s nearly all I can think about.
- Some weeks later, the honeymoon period begins to fade, and it starts to feel normal instead of new and shiny. Inevitably, something in my customized config isn’t working right, and debugging it feels more like a chore now than an exciting side quest.
- [current status] Start to wonder, is modal editing really any better for my use cases?
- Switch back to non-modal editing, embracing the Emacs movements baked into macOS. Feel content.
- Eventually, get itchy feet and return to (1).
I write a lot, but not a lot of code. Most of my writing is note-taking, chat messages, emails, documentation, blog posts, etc.
I know it’s annoying to say “here’s what an LLM said,” but here’s what an LLM (Claude) said. I found it useful because it’s really flippin’ hard to find an unbiased opinion on modal vs. non-modal editing from humans on the internet.
Mode-switching overhead is genuinely worse for bursty, prose-heavy, or exploratory editing (writing docs, README updates, chat messages) than for surgical code edits. If a lot of your work is prose or config files rather than repetitive code transforms, the ROI on modal editing is just lower — that’s not a skill issue.
Insert mode in Vim is worse than a normal text editor at insert-mode things (multi-cursor, smart autocomplete UX) unless you layer on plugins that basically reimplement what other editors give you for free.
If you’re constantly context-switching between Neovim and a non-modal editor (which you are, with code-server as primary), you pay a tax every switch — your fingers do the wrong thing in the wrong app for the first few edits.
There’s no objectively correct answer to the question of modal vs. non-modal editing, but those thoughts from Claude vibe with what I’m feeling. Constantly hopping between modes starts to feel clunky after a while, like I’m tripping over shoelaces. And when I drop modal editing and just go with the macOS default movements I know so well, it feels like I’m being let off a leash. If I were spending all day in code, I’d probably feel differently.
Admittedly, a factor here is that I use Ctrl-[ to escape from insert mode.
I do that because I already have Caps mapped to Control.
But those extra keystrokes add up.
I should try the Karabiner-powered option of having Caps be Escape when it’s tapped and Control when it’s held.
Or maybe mapping right-Command to Escape.
Or something more efficient.
But that’s more third-party software to install and manage.
Which gets me back to: is it really worth it?