Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance • Buttondown
"I think the best explanation is that in a vacuum modal editing sounds like a bad idea. The mode is global state that users always have to know, which makes it dangerous. To use new modes well you have to memorize all of the keybindings, which makes it difficult." good post but i would point to things like DAWs and trackers as modal interfaces (there's a record mode and an edit mode)