Well, there's nothing stopping you from entering the content with the letter keys, deleting it with the backspace key and navigating with the arrow keys in any

Well, there's nothing stopping you from entering the content with the letter keys, deleting it with the backspace key and navigating with the arrow keys in any editor, Vi[m] included. If that's all you do when working with text, Vi[m]'s modes won't bug you at all. Stay in insert mode as long as you want: you can even use <C-o>… to execute normal mode commands while staying in insert mode or consider the command mode exactly as you would consider the menus of any GUI editor. But that's not all of what I do when editing text and I need more than those basics. What's special with Vi[m] is that it offers me modes that make it possible to do more advanced stuff or the same stuff in a smarter way with a very simple and easy to learn language. Do you always move character by character and line by line? How do you paste something 12 times? How do you delete a block of code? How do you type over the current word? How do you open a newline below the current one if you are somewhere in the middle? Don't you ever think "this task is too repetitive or involves too many steps, I'd like to do it more efficiently"? Because of its modality Vi[m] has you covered. In style, with a simple vocabulary and an expressive grammar while other normal editors only offer a comparatively smaller feature set and horrible Ctrl+Sift+Alt+Char combos. That's what makes Vim, and modality, special, in my opinion. And still extremelly useful, 30+ years after. But I may be wrong. The incredible productivity boost I had in the last 2 years may completely be a construct of my imagination.