Are you saying the term modeless only applies to text editing? I thought it was a general UI term that can be applied to any program and means that keystrokes a

Are you saying the term modeless only applies to text editing? I thought it was a general UI term that can be applied to any program and means that keystrokes always mean the same thing independent of context. In that case, Emacs as a whole is not modeless, but usually each individual buffer is. And sorry for getting the history wrong. I think I mixed the ITS and Multics versions up. Maybe the email reader was only in the ITS version and the Multics version had the ability to call the PL/I or Fortran compiler within Emacs and get a buffer with an error list. Does that sound right? And I'm not sure about command shells, that's probably just wrong and they came later.