To understand Why Modes Are Wrong™, consider Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle: https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/inventing-on-principle-by-bret-victor

To understand Why Modes Are Wrong™, consider Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle: https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/inventing-on-principle-by-bret-victor https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/inventing-on-principle... An app is the Ultimate Mode, of course, and there is a contextual sweet spot where you can draw the line between universality and contextual exclusivity. This line depends on "nearness" (or familiarity) and your short & long-term working memory, but in general humans seem to enjoy universal modalities like Select/Cut/Copy/Paste that do not require you to switch into "Cut Mode" or "Copy Mode" while you are working with text, i.e. heritable context should provide heritable modes. And yet, religious Vim users champion granular modes above all, including Selection and Edit modes. My conclusion is that they are either very wrong, or serious users have different neural architectures.