Comment by tejuis

I've used Emacs for 30 years. In the very beginning swapped capslock and control. After 20 years started to have minor problems with the pinky. A lot of keyboard use. Did not like evil mode for several reasons. It meant a lot of configuration and relearning commands. Tried out god-mode for a short while, but had some sharp edges, and went back to normal. Retried god-mode with more effort to make it work for me and never looked back. At that point it took a long time to get everything to muscle memory, though. Maybe two months to feel ok and years to feel good.

I use "i" to get into editing mode (normal emacs mode) and control-backspace to get to god-mode. I mostly use searching for moving in the buffers. In god-mode it means pressing "s" and then typing the search text with enter marking the search text completion. Then I use "." to search forwards and "," to search backwards. If I want to search for the word(s) at point, I do "s" and "enter" and then "j" to grow the search word, word by word. When ready, again "." searches forwards and "," backwards.

The most common operations, like changing buffers and emacs windows, are under single key press. Everything is quite effortless.

The best properties for god-mode for me is that you can use the same key combinations as normally, just producing them in a sligthly different way, and that you can also do keychord edits in editing mode if that is convenient. You don't have to exit editing mode at all, if that helps.

The obvious compromise with modal editing is that you have to know in which mode you are in and that some of the useful commands are not available in the editing mode, and then you have to switch modes to get them. However, with god-mode related editing mode you always have all the keys available, and you only have to know the mode you are in (at least partly). I would never settle with evil mode, but god-mode works very well. A lot of benefits with moderate amount of downsides, therefore a win all in all.