Comment by lelanthran

> No, they generally can't save their whole internal state to be resumed later, and definitely not in the document you were editing.

I broadly agree, but I feel you chose a poor example - Vim.

> For example, when you save a document in vim it doesn't store the mode you were in,

Without user-mods, it does in fact start up in the mode that you were in when you saved, because you can only save in command/normal mode.

> or the keyboard macro step that was executing,

Without user-mods, you aren't able to interrupt a macro that is executing anyway, so if you cannot save mid-macro, why would you load mid-macro?

> or the search buffer,

Vim, by default, "remembers" all my previous searches, all the macros, and all my undos, even across sessions. The undo history is remembered per file.