While I respect the research done concerning modal UI and the associated consequences of that in the context of HCI, in practice I do not find that there is ever any confusion about what mode I am in when using Vim after using the editor for many hours, and if one was supremely concerned with avoiding such confusion UI changes per state could be implemented so that the changes were unavoidably obvious (such as by changing the entire background to a different color on a context switch).
The design has some nice benefits elsewhere too with how Vim uses it.
However, I do not find Emacs chording emphasis particularly demented either though, especially once the full array of modifiers are used.
The amount of chords is only really burdensome due to how many domains Emacs covers though IMO, as it makes collisions with short chords much more frequent as the amount of keybinds necessarily expands.
I find the criticisms of Vim usually extremely exaggerated and generally indicative of ignorance concerning its design, some of which you have correctly noted and addressed in your response.
That is not to say that Vim is without its imperfections, but the design is well thought out, coherent, and well documented which makes the learning curve bearable.
I find a mixture of chords and modes in Emacs quite nice using Evil-mode as I can choose to either avoid changing states or not, unlike in Vim.
As I have noted elsewhere though, there is no intrinsic reason why Emacs must use chording over a modal design or some other means of using individual key sequences to invoke commands.
It is merely a matter of redesigning how commands are invoked across Emacs, something which some people are working on and may be interesting in the future.
I do wish there was something up to date that was similar to Practical Vim but for Emacs though as that was a very illuminating and fun text.
Do you know of some documentation that elucidates CEDET more than the documentation on the site does? I have read that documentation a few times and have yet to grok what it really does and how one would use it in practice. It seems extremely powerful but I do not see how an end user takes advantage of it or how an extension writer would use it to compose an IDE for a new language.
While I respect the research done concerning modal UI and the associated consequences of that in the context of HCI, in practice I do not find that there is ever any confusion about what mode I am in when using Vim after using the editor for many hours, and if one was supremely concerned with avoiding such confusion UI changes per state could be implemented so that the changes were unavoidably obvious (such as by changing the entire background to a different color on a context switch).
The design has some nice benefits elsewhere too with how Vim uses it.
However, I do not find Emacs chording emphasis particularly demented either though, especially once the full array of modifiers are used.
The amount of chords is only really burdensome due to how many domains Emacs covers though IMO, as it makes collisions with short chords much more frequent as the amount of keybinds necessarily expands.
I find the criticisms of Vim usually extremely exaggerated and generally indicative of ignorance concerning its design, some of which you have correctly noted and addressed in your response.
That is not to say that Vim is without its imperfections, but the design is well thought out, coherent, and well documented which makes the learning curve bearable.
I find a mixture of chords and modes in Emacs quite nice using Evil-mode as I can choose to either avoid changing states or not, unlike in Vim.
As I have noted elsewhere though, there is no intrinsic reason why Emacs must use chording over a modal design or some other means of using individual key sequences to invoke commands.
It is merely a matter of redesigning how commands are invoked across Emacs, something which some people are working on and may be interesting in the future.
I do wish there was something up to date that was similar to Practical Vim but for Emacs though as that was a very illuminating and fun text.
Do you know of some documentation that elucidates CEDET more than the documentation on the site does? I have read that documentation a few times and have yet to grok what it really does and how one would use it in practice. It seems extremely powerful but I do not see how an end user takes advantage of it or how an extension writer would use it to compose an IDE for a new language.