Sunchoke, Monday, 3 November 12025 HE
Topinambour, Tridi, 13 Brumaire An CCXXXIV
C, a.d. III Non. Nov. AUC MMDCCLXXVIII
13.0.13.1.0, 11 Ajaw 18 Sak’
19V13 | 2460983
2016-09-28 – Nikon D3300
phone pole, San José, California
Music Instructor – “Super Fly” ↗
a week or so ago, Hillel Wayne wrote about modal editing in the vi/vim line of editors – “the clearest benefit is you can densely pack the keyboard with advanced commands” with keys doing different things depending on whether you’re in normal, visual, or insert mode – it certainly provides an alternate to the sequences of chained chords popularized by Emacs
but – do we really need such a profusion of commands? – most programmers on a daily basis are only going to be using a small subset of whatever their editor provides (and there’s certainly plenty of other tools to make up for anything missing) – more importantly though, approaching things from a user experience perspective, a surefire path to confusion is when an action (pressing a key, clicking a button) yields different results depending on context (mode)
Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance ↗
the day after
the day before
the month before
the quarter before
the year before