The ideas about modality and chording are nicely laid out, but not unique to "text editing". They apply to any use of the keyboard for editing any kind of data.

The ideas about modality and chording are nicely laid out, but not unique to "text editing". They apply to any use of the keyboard for editing any kind of data. We see this in Ardour (a DAW (audio workstation)) a lot. Quite a few other DAWs differentiate between adding a new (MIDI) note and editing an existing (MIDI) note with a modifier ("chording"). In Ardour we use modality - no modifiers. We consider the modal model better if you're going to do multiple versions of the same sort of operation, which we believe (but do not have hard data) is the most common case.