I find that console apps are far less intuitive when it comes to visual thinkers. I also am not too keen on modal editing, it doesn't match how I do most things in life. I don't have to switch out my teeth when eating vs drinking. It just doesn't seem natural to me. I've always found I'm more productive with a GUI. Command line is great for simple tasks and executing commands, but editing files has always seemed less than ideal. You have to remember so many key combinations and commands and track what mode you are in and what modes are available. I would rather spend that brain power on solving problems.

> I don't have to switch out my teeth when eating vs drinking.

But you do switch how your mouth is working when switching between eating and drinking. In one, you masticate and move food around your mouth before swallowing once (maybe twice), whereas the other involves directing fluids back to your throat which acts in a near-continuous swallowing action.

> You have to remember so many key combinations and commands

They become muscle memory after an admittedly non-trivial amount of use. Yes, it is an investment in your future usage of that tool.

And to be fair, you had to memorize C-x, C-c, and C-v at one point too.

He doesn't control his mouth when switching between eating and breathing, I'm pretty sure that it's part of the autonomic system. You kind of made his point since there's no way Vim actions actually become fully reflex actions, especially the powerful stuff that separates Vim from a good IDE, since the vast majority of those really complex actions will be done at best dozens of times per day (and I'm being generous here).

> there's no way Vim actions actually become fully reflex actions

You might be surprised. Maybe not quite the level of a true "reflex", but it can get close. I find I not infrequently get weird compile/test/spellcheck errors when I'm not using vim and go back to find a string of vi keystrokes in the middle of my document that I typed without consciously realizing.

what is a visual thinker?

90% of the world and 15% of HackerNews.

Jokes aside, do you understand the architecture of a system better from a diagram than from a 2 page description?

If I'm not mistaken, the reason vim doesn't allow a lot of key bindings (like control+shift+key, control+symbol) is because of the terminal, so in theory a GUI should allow to bind them.

> What would a GUI bring to this that isn't possible in the console?

Not being destructive of user input, for starters.

I'm with Kaod here - what do you mean by this?

Not sure I understand what you mean.

For example the fact that the terminal does not make any difference between <c-m> and <ret>. Or <c-i> and <tab>.

You know what? I was ready for bullshit and you actually gave a compelling answer :P Yeah, that's a bummer, but there aren't that many instances of that drawback (it's bitten me a couple times maybe in many years?) and on the other hand text mode gives a lot of convenience like being able to use it from SSH and other niceties.

Anyways, I don't think such behavior is inherent to "the console", only Linux's particular implementation (i.e. it's tty's fault) which admittedly is pretty outdated and relies a bit too much on control characters.

IMHO the original question still stands:

> What would a GUI bring to this that isn't possible in the console?

In my experience text mode brings a lot that GUIs don't, and not the other way around.

Plus it's easier to make a GUI wrapper for a console program than a console wrapper for a GUI program.

Yes it's in no way a dealbreaker, but it starts rearing its head when you want to use keys outside of the alphanumeric cluster.

I also absolutely agree that this is the correct way for an editor to be implemented.

How is that destructive?

Visual editors assign various non-editing tasks to command sequences as well. Pycharm moves the cursor around parenthesis with C-m for example, Cmd-M minimizes windows, and Cmd-I does formatting.

I don't understand what you mean. It's destructive in the sense that the raw input is not even being passed to the application in the terminal.

No applications running in the terminal will be able to tell the difference between these two different key presses.

You could use a nicer font, for one.

My console lets me use every font on the system. It even lets me convert variable-width fonts into monospace fonts.

Granted, it won't support using variable-width fonts as-is; but that's never been a problem for me.