Helix is beginner friendly. It's keybindings make more sense than vim's.

Yeah but it’s a small island.

If you learn Vim you’ll have access to Vi and Vi-like interfaces in lots of other software including terminals, database clients and everything that uses readline.

Curious what kind of interfaces you're thinking about? (Aside from vi, vim, nvim)

From my experience anything with "vi navigation" basically just means using the home row keys for navigation + modes. So I haven't come across many interfaces yet where the verb order differences between helix/vim come into play.

Then the question is readline. Not saying that vi or emacs deserve to win readline, but it’s up to you to describe how Helix mode would differ from vi mode.

Overleaf, for example, supports most of Vim’s bindings.

In vimium I use vim navigation for scrolling around, / for search, and a bunch of tab actions that aren't vim accurate but vim inspired.

In mpv I use gg/G to getting to the beginning/end of a file.

Many terminal file managers use vim binds or idioms (such as x for delete, marks, etc).

i3 window manager leans heavily on vim defaults for navigating windows.

Shells have Vi mode: bash, fish, zsh.

For me, the reason to learn vim is because if you know how to use it it's a really nice editor that's preinstalled on almost any system you shell into. I use VSCode on my home system and occasionally on a remote system, but I'll use neovim when doing a quick edit from the command line and vi when I happen to be o a remote system. In my ideal world, I would just use one editor everywhere, including if I'm hot-seating on a system that is not mine and without internet access: having vi already under my fingers is a nice approximation of great editor + everywhere.

Helix is wonderful. I did make one keybinding change: Switching in and out of Insert mode is CTRL-i so I don't have to wander off to the escape key so often.

I think Helix by default binds `Ctrl-[` to return to normal mode.

That was more convenient for me, especially as I remap my caps-lock key to CTRL system-wide.

it’s not helix, ctrl-[ produces the same key code as escape and it works the same in a terminal (so it works in vi, emacs, etc)

>If only there were a more gentle path to editor modes. Maybe some simple graphical representation of the modes and commands that could be down in the corner?

I taught myself vim by setting the vim cheat sheet to be my terminal background, though I greyed it out slightly so it didn't obscure what I was typing. Once you have that there are only a few phrases you really need to know: "+p, "+y, "+d to access the system clipboard, :split and :vsplit, C-w w to switch windows, and g C-g for word/char count.

https://www.glump.net/_media/howto/desktop/vim-graphical-che...

If I had a lot more free time, I've been noodling with some designs for a text editor with modes. It would start up by default in the equivalent of vim's insert mode where all the normal CUA keybindings (e.g. ctrl-c for copy) worked. But with many more. Then, if you go to the equivalent of normal mode you can just press X to do the same thing ctrl-X does in insert mode.