> modal editing doesn’t really fit my mental model of how an editor should work
The whole point of vim is that you change your mental model to become faster at editing text. People don't come into programming with a blank slate about editors, they were introduced to wysiwyg editors from an early age because of Microsoft Word, web based text input, and now phones (with emojis too). A mental model had been impressed already, but that doesn't make it the "default" or the best.
I used notpad++ in college, then switched to vim after I saw my boss edit some code while I was looking over his shoulder. He could do complex editing tasks with just a couple keystrokes and doing them so fast that I couldn't keep up just watching. It seemed like he was editing at the same speed as he was thinking which didn't seem possible to me at the time.
The whole point of vim is that you change your mental model to become faster at editing text. People don't come into programming with a blank slate about editors, they were introduced to wysiwyg editors from an early age because of Microsoft Word, web based text input, and now phones (with emojis too). A mental model had been impressed already, but that doesn't make it the "default" or the best.
I used notpad++ in college, then switched to vim after I saw my boss edit some code while I was looking over his shoulder. He could do complex editing tasks with just a couple keystrokes and doing them so fast that I couldn't keep up just watching. It seemed like he was editing at the same speed as he was thinking which didn't seem possible to me at the time.