Comment by iLemming

There weren't any true "wars" to begin with. The entire thing is just absurd. These ideas are not even in competition, it's like arguing whether a piano or sheet music is "better".

Emacs veterans simply rejected the entire concept of modality, without even trying to understand what it is about. Emacs is inherently a modal editor. Key-chords are stateful, Transient menus (i.e. Magit) are modals, completion is a modal, isearch, dired, calc, C-u (universal argument), recursive editing — these are all modals. What the idea of vim-motions offers is a universal, simplified, structured language to deal with modality, that's all.

Vim users on the other hand keep saying "there's no such thing as vim-mode". And to a certain degree they are right — no vim plugin outside of vim/neovim implements all the features — IdeaVim, VSCode vim plugins, Sublime, etc. - all of them are full of holes and glaring deficiencies. With one notable exception — Evil-mode in Emacs. It is so wonderfully implemented, you wouldn't even notice that it is a plugin, an afterthought. It really does feel like a baked-in, native feature of the editor.

There are no "wars" in our industry — pretty much only misunderstanding, misinterpretation and misuse of certain ideas. It's not even technological — who knows, maybe it's not even sociotechnological. People simply like talking past each other, defending different values without acknowledging they're optimizing for different things.

It's not Vim's, Emacs' or VSCode's fault that we suffer from identity investment - we spend hundreds of hours using one so it becomes our identity. We suffer from simplification impulse — we just love binary choices, we constantly have the nagging "which is better?" question, even when it makes little sense. We're predisposed to tribal belonging — having a common enemy creates in-group cohesion.

But real, experienced craftspeople... they just use whatever works best for them in a given context. That's what we all should strive for — discover old and new ideas, study them, identify good ones, borrow them, shelve the bad ones (who knows, maybe in a different context they may still prove useful). Most importantly, use whatever makes you and your teammates happy. It's far more important than being more productive or being decisively right. If thy stupid thing works, perhaps it ain't that stupid?