> People choose vi because of modal editing, not because they are ignorant of the Emacs feature set.
Exactly this. I had used Emacs for many, many years and finally decided to give Vim a go... and never looked back. Emacs is very powerful, and while the Elisp infrastructure has distinct advantages over Vimscript, the compositional richness of Vim's editing model is amazing. I don't have to drop to scripting because Vim gives me the power I need more quickly and easily.
So, that said, have you tried out spacemacs? It's really, really good. It's not a zero cost switch, but I really think it makes the good things about vim work in emacs.
Curious that you chose to switch editor outright rather than just install some more modal package, after all those years. I chouse the former as the path of least resistance.
That choice was actually motivated for other reasons rather than just the modal workflow. The biggest of which was that (at the time) I found I had to really struggle to get Emacs and its ecosystem to play nicely with a highly project-centric workflow. I had used old vi regularly starting decades ago, and thus had basic usage burned in. E.g. I never understood these seemingly lame "minimal system editors" that some distros use vs. the old sysadmin standard of a minimal vi implementation (vs. full vim, emacs, etc.)
But it was becoming clear that something else was going on with modern vim, so after testing the waters a bit for my needs, I decided to go all-in as much as an ecosystem research project as anything else.
Exactly this. I had used Emacs for many, many years and finally decided to give Vim a go... and never looked back. Emacs is very powerful, and while the Elisp infrastructure has distinct advantages over Vimscript, the compositional richness of Vim's editing model is amazing. I don't have to drop to scripting because Vim gives me the power I need more quickly and easily.