The Man Who Hated Modes Helped Give Us Copy and Paste

The plate read NOMODES. He drove his argument around with him

Type with i, come back with Esc, over and over. That switch is, historically, one of the most disliked ideas in computing.

Larry Tesler spent his career chasing interfaces without modes. Along the way he named and spread cut, copy and paste, which you now use every day. He kept saying that modes make people slip, and he meant it. The license plate on his car read NOMODES, and so did the name of his personal site. Vim is built around the very thing he spent a career arguing against.

Modes do make people slip. He was right. Vim keeps them anyway, because what they buy is worth the price.