Comment by lvass

If you're having to use Caps lock as control, modal editing is probably worth it. The one thing that makes non-modal editing far superior to modal, for me, is how easy it is to reach my Control key, as the palm of my left hand is always hovering over it and I learned to press it with my palm without having to ever move my fingers or hitting the wrong key.

I think the vim model in particular is great in terms of becoming muscle memory in like, a few months. It saves a few keystrokes compared to Emacs specially if you're counting Control as a key press. Navigating is a tad nicer with hjkl being next to each other. Having to press Esc after each edit just sucks though.