Umm...he's clearly not an idiot. Check his CV if you don't believe me. But he does say that. There are two possible conclusions: 1. Despite all the evidence

Umm...he's clearly not an idiot. Check his CV if you don't believe me. But he does say that. There are two possible conclusions: 1. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he is in fact an idiot. 2. I'm quoting him out of context. I took classes from him at UCSD. Maybe I didn't understand him. But maybe I did. 3. You don't know enough about his philosophy to understand what he means, but he really, really does mean that. Not "in context," but always. Now despite my respect for him, I think he does gloss over the power user UI when he says that. He has an entire book on how bad the Unix command line is, and yet there are some things I wouldn't want to use a GUI for. But I'm not a typical user; probably very few people on HN are. Think about the "Principle of Least Astonishment," though. [1] The more things that work as you expect, the better an API or language is, right? The same should be true of an editor. I know that in vim you can reuse your knowledge in many ways, but it's all restricted to the vim environment. You can hack that environment onto a command line; maybe even hack it into Firefox text entry boxes. But there are dozens of apps that won't have that ability, and you'll be handicapped in all of them. And there are millions of people who know how to use CUA keyboard shortcuts, and for them the PLA says to have the basic controls use CUA standards. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...