There's tons of professional writers though, not to mention business users, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots of writing. It's pretty obvious that desktops are going the way of the dodo, and the aforementioned users need to write lots of text on mobile devices. I don't think modal text entry is any more onerous to learn than a graphic artist learning Blender or Photoshop, or an engineer learning Solidworks.

There may be fewer desktops, but laptops work the same way and they don't seem to be going away any time soon. I'm not aware of "tons of professional writers, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots of writing" who spend most of their writing time on the type of mobile devices described in this article.

I'm not saying they are now. I'm saying they will in the future.

I really doubt people are every going to give up big stand-alone monitors.

Putting cellphones on big standalone monitors might work. But in that case, we’ll probably also need to attach a pointing device and some way of entering text, so from a UI point of view, we’ve got a desktop.

Cellphones definitely have sufficient processing power for lots of typical office workloads nowadays… but using them in this way doesn’t seem to have caught on.

I dunno, eventually this sort of discussion ends up at “why didn’t DeX take over the world,” a question for which I have no good answers, since, like everyone else, I never tried it out.

I occasionally use DeX. It is fine, if you are needing to read email, browse the web, or do simple word processing, or need a touch interface for drawing. If I'm going to sit down and work for multiple hours, I'd rather be using my desktop applications.

No, the aforementioned users do not need to write lots of text on mobile devices - a professional writer will choose or adapt their devices and environment to best suit the needs of their writing work, not adapt their writing to better suit the limitations of the devices; instead it's all the "casual" users who need to make do with whatever device they have on hand even if that device was optimized for entirely different needs.

But nowadays you can install custom keyboards on every OS that could probably get you most of the way there.

Do you know of an example?

Sadly, no. There certainly are lots of novel keyboards out there that can be googled up, but perhaps the kinds of features that would make a vim/modal-type keyboard be interesting and useful on mobile require further API hooks into the standard text-input controls (to be able to do things like find word and line boundaries, perform complex selections and replacements, etc).

I wonder if ultimately, the advantages of a "stay on the home row" philosophy like vim has just don't really manifest when there's no longer a physical keyboard as the underlying HMI. But the core idea of doing something modal and separating movement/selection from input does still feel valuable.

I dunno, Samsung's default keyboard already has am implementation of modal editing, which was loved by most of it's users that I knew.

Not in the same way as vim, but you could hit a hot key to switch your keyboard to a navigation/select/copy+paste mode.

That's fine, the average computer user also doesn't use modal editing

I don't think so, but the mode change can't be some obscure thing slightly changing in the status bar.