[iLemming]

> Or do people use it for coding too?

Over time, you may discover one of the biggest truth about computing - the immense (and sadly disregarded) value of plain text¹. Code is nothing but structured text. The cardinal job of a programmer is text manipulation.

I'm reading this thread in my editor. Why? Because I'm dealing with text - browsers are great for presentation of text, not so nice for manipulating it. What kind of manipulations? Well, I can find, sort, group, narrow, collapse/expand, translate, extract summaries for paragraphs, find all the URLs (including matching a pattern), etc. Good luck doing all that in the browser - even with the extensions.

Most developers don't even get annoyed by seemingly small things. Like how often do you need to bring the url of a given browser tab into your editor? Simplest thing, yet do it dozens of times a day and it gets vexing. For me - it takes milliseconds and a keypress - it even extracts the URL description and converts the link to markdown (if needed).

Or another example - whenever someone's screen sharing, or I'm watching a video and they show a piece of text (let's just for consistency say a url). How would you normally extract it? e.g, for your notes. For me - it takes selecting a region of screen and a keypress - my editor calls a CLI OCRing tool and voila. I don't really care that the source isn't "technically speaking" text - if I can read it, then computer for sure can "read" it too, am I right? That's text manipulation.

There may be dozens (if not hundreds) of such examples (including coding-related) in my workflow that work on top of the idea of manipulating plain text.

Once you grok the cerebral virtue of the idea of having complete and total control over text, you may find that modal editors - nvim/emacs/etc. - are the best instruments to achieve that control.

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¹https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html