[pritovido]

The difference between a modal editor and a GUI one is that in the GUI one, the commands are organized in the menu and you access this mode(the menu display mode) by clicking instead of pressing a key.

In fact, if you use shorcuts, they are the same thing.

Modal editing is not hard. I learned vim and emacs without problems. Step by step, focusing on what was the next thing useful for me and learning it after that.

Not harder than learning German or English or Chinese Mandarin. Any human languages is way more sophisticated and people learn it anyway.

There is 3.000 words (or commands) that you need to use to speak a basic language. 20.000 if you are an educated person.

Do you believe that if people in Germany speak german fluently they are trying to signal anything to others?

People learn a language because they use it. As simple as that. The more you use it, the easier it gets.

[Viliam1234]

If the commands are well organized in the menu, any fool can find them. But remembering dozens of shortcuts clearly signals you know more than those who do not remember them. How would people recognize true experts if we all switched to less arcane versions of Notepad?

[IshKebab]

> Modal editing is not hard. ... Not harder than learning German or English or Chinese Mandarin.

Oh sure, it's not hard at all when compared to something really hard!

> Do you believe that if people in Germany speak german fluently they are trying to signal anything to others?

No they speak German because that's the easiest option for communicating with other people. Vim is not the easiest option for text editing.

Terrible analogy.

[wander_homer]

>Oh sure, it's not hard at all when compared to something really hard!

I guess the point is that it's not as hard as many people make it seem. I switched from Sublime Text to vim and in a matter of one or two days I felt comfortable editing text with it and in contrast to other editors the learning curve quickly flattened, because you're actually learning a rather simplistic language with grammar and a small vocabulary, instead of memorizing key sequences which most of the time don't follow any logic.

> No they speak German because that's the easiest option for communicating with other people. Vim is not the easiest option for text editing.

What is the easiest option then? And I'm not talking about the easiest option during the first week, but afterwards (i.e. the majority of time).