I’ve tried vim on and off during college but never really had the time to fully get working with it. As it turns out the stress of two degrees is not conducive to “fun activities”. Now that I have a real job ™️, I’ve decided to finally try and use it this week full stop and I genuinely feel like a programming chad. There’s still a lot I’ll need to learn and probably overtime I’ll discover some inefficiency in how I’m using it now but it really does just feel good. I understand the hype now.
I was just going to say this. The modal part is the important part. Helix seems great, but I was unable to find a killer feature to draw me away.
Also, OP, realize you will always be nerd sniped. :-)
I use Emacs BTW, and sometimes helix (after 20 years of vim).
For me, the killer feature is the consistent selection->action grammar followed by the discoverability features. Being able to see what I am doing before I do it works much better for me and having those little pop ups for the space and g menus mean that I learned the bindings so much faster and use more of them that I ever did for either emacs or vim.
Emacs has this with the Hydra plugin, iirc. Particularly, Doom Emacs already has this feature packaged.