But this is the shell we're talking about, one of the primary interface for development work, so I think the effort is worth it. By relying heavily on edit-comm

But this is the shell we're talking about, one of the primary interface for development work, so I think the effort is worth it. By relying heavily on edit-command-line, you have to choose between coping with suboptimal keybindings and opening a text editor every time you want to run a command. Also, zsh's vi bindings are surprisingly good. Obviously, it won't be useful as a full-fledged text editor. But it's more than good enough for command line editing. It even has visual mode and registers, which you rarely see implemented in an interpreter. It's true that it requires some configuration though. At least around 20 lines. Zsh's vi mode inherits vi's quirks that are normally disabled in Vim, including the weird backspace behavior in insert mode. Those have to be overridden individually. Text objects and surround bindings need to be explicitly bound too.