In fact, if you use shorcuts, they are the same thing.
Modal editing is not hard. I learned vim and emacs without problems. Step by step, focusing on what was the next thing useful for me and learning it after that.
Not harder than learning German or English or Chinese Mandarin. Any human languages is way more sophisticated and people learn it anyway.
There is 3.000 words (or commands) that you need to use to speak a basic language. 20.000 if you are an educated person.
Do you believe that if people in Germany speak german fluently they are trying to signal anything to others?
People learn a language because they use it. As simple as that. The more you use it, the easier it gets.
Oh sure, it's not hard at all when compared to something really hard!
> Do you believe that if people in Germany speak german fluently they are trying to signal anything to others?
No they speak German because that's the easiest option for communicating with other people. Vim is not the easiest option for text editing.
Terrible analogy.
I guess the point is that it's not as hard as many people make it seem. I switched from Sublime Text to vim and in a matter of one or two days I felt comfortable editing text with it and in contrast to other editors the learning curve quickly flattened, because you're actually learning a rather simplistic language with grammar and a small vocabulary, instead of memorizing key sequences which most of the time don't follow any logic.
> No they speak German because that's the easiest option for communicating with other people. Vim is not the easiest option for text editing.
What is the easiest option then? And I'm not talking about the easiest option during the first week, but afterwards (i.e. the majority of time).
A non-modal editor like VSCode.
Do you suffer for thinking on English? Do you suffer for driving your car and changing gears? Do you suffer for using a pen for writing?
You can try to write with the hand you don't usually write with. You would suffer if you try to write the same things you write with the other hand but if you improve a little every day over time you will be capable of writing with it well.
It’s entirely possible to learn modal editing without suffering but it’s not likely to learn it without struggling, given how most people are raised on the mouse.
Kakoune's development has started fairly recently. The oldest tags on its GitHub repo are for 2018. I think this defies "people want to continue the legacy of actually-not-that-great thing because I had do suffer, so other people should too". I think you'd only put into making/promoting Kakoune if you genuinely thought modal editing is a good thing.
Whereas, if the bigger value in "I learned modal editing" is the signal of "modal editing is hard, so anyone who knows it must be good" (rather than value from a better developer experience), I think aiming to make modal editing more intuitive/accessible is counter-productive.