Why are there so few modal-editors that aren't vi*? [closed]

Answer 1

I think that it's because vi (and its ilk) already occupies the ecological niche of modal editors.

The number of people who prefer modal and haven't yet been attracted to vi is probably 0, so the hypothetical vi competitor would have to be so great as to make a significant number of vi users switch. This isn't likely. The cost of switching editors is huge and the vi-s are probably already as good as modal editors go. Well, maybe a significant breakthrough could improve upon them, but I find this unlikely.

Answer 2

Modal editors have the huge advantage to touch typists that you can navigate around the screen without taking your hands off the home row. My wrists only hurt when I'm doing stuff that requires me to move my hand off the keyboard and onto the mouse or arrow keys and back constantly.

Answer 3

It's worth noting that the vi input models survival is in part due it's adoption in the POSIX standard, so investing time in learning would mean your guarenteed to be able to work on any system complying to these standards. So, like English, theres power in ubiquity.

As far as alternatives go, I doubt an alternate model editor would survive a 30 day free trial period, so its the same reason more people drive automatics than fly jets.

Answer 4

The invention of the mouse took one mode and moved it to an input device, and context menus took another mode and moved it to a button. Ironically, the advent of touch devices has had the reverse effect, producing multi-modal interfaces:

• aware multi-modal - touch and speech are aware of each other and intersect

• unaware multi-modal - touch and speech are unaware of each other and conflict

The traditional WIMP interfaces have the basic premise that the information can flow in and out of the system through a single channel or an event stream. This event stream can be in the form of input (mouse, keyboard etc) where the user enters data to the system and expects feedback in the form of output (voice, vibration, visual, etc) when the system responds. But the channel maintains its singularity and can process information one source at a time. For example, in today’s interaction, the computer ignores typed information (through a keyboard) when a mouse button is depressed.

This is very much different from a multimodal interaction where the system has multiple event streams and channels and can process information coming through various input modes acting in parallel, such as those described above. For example, in an IVR system a user can either type or speak to navigate through the menu.

References

• User Agent Accessibility Guidelines working group (UAWG): Keyboard Interface use cases

• W3C Multimodal Standard Brings Web to More People, More Ways

• Next steps for W3C work on Multimodal Standards

• The Future of Interaction is Multimodal

• Beyond Mouse and Keyboard: Expanding Design Considerations for Information Visualization Interactions - naturalinfovis_infovis2012.pdf

• Setting the scope for light-weight Web-based applications

• Jan. 26, 1983: Spreadsheet as Easy as 1-2-3

• Multi-modal design: Gesture, Touch and Mobile devices...next big thing? | Experience Dynamics

Answer 5

Remember that Notepad is a modal editor!

To see this, try typing E, D, I, T; now try typing Alt, E, D, I, T. In the second case the Alt key activates the "menu mode" so the results are different. :oP People seem to cope with that.

(Yes, this is a feature of Windows rather than specifically of Notepad. I think it's a bad feature because it is easy to hit Alt by mistake and I don't think you can turn it off.)

Answer 6

VIM and emacs make about as much user interface design sense as qwerty. We now have available modern computer optimized key layouts (see the colemak layout and the carpalx project); it's only a matter of time before someone does the same for text editors.