Can you provide a concrete example, like a piece of text with the current cursor position, the outcome you want to achieve and the sequence of shortcuts you're using to achieve that with your favorite text editor?
> Navigating by word is my primary means of moving through a line.
So how does your new editor do that more efficiently than pressing <Esc> once, followed by pressing <w> or <b> once for each word?
Navigating by word is a matter of holding the Option key and pressing left or right arrow. Same number of keys, but works pretty much everywhere. The box used to enter this comment, for example.
Just to be super clear, I don’t care what other people do. Go nuts with vi bindings. I was just agreeing with what someone else said, that vi bindings aren’t peak UI and that “hacker” != “vi”
No, you suggested that leaving insert mode to navigate by words is somehow less efficient (since navigating by word is your primary way to navigate in lines) and that maybe that's why you're happy you stopped using vi.
Now we found out that leaving insert mode to navigate by words requires the "same number of keys", so @gsinclair was right and it is unnecessary to stay in insert mode for navigation.
> Same number of keys, but works pretty much everywhere. The box used to enter this comment, for example.
If efficient word navigation was the only thing vim key bindings had to offer I wouldn't be using them. But they do offer many things the current text box does not offer and since (as a programmer) I'm spending 95% of my time in an IDE and not some browser text box, I'll gladly accept some inconsistencies if that means editing and navigating in my IDE becomes more pleasant.
So you know what I find super weird is that - despite my other comment to you earlier about using vi since the early 90s - I can’t actually name the key bindings for vi with much certainty.
I’ve been using it for so long that apparently the muscle memory is the only memory I have.
I mean thinks like yy and p and ZZ sure, but for navigation I know where on the keyboard it is - but not the keys. (At least not while I’m using an iPhone keyboard)
The purpose of insert mode is to insert text, and that’s it. This occupies a very small proportion of total editing time.