Vim is the worst editor, except all the other editors

If you, like most people, spend most of your time entering text, then it is factually correct that you must exit the text-entry mode to do anything else.

And do you know why this arrangement exists? Because there were teletype terminals and early glass terminals that didn't have control keys. No control keys, no way to exploit their existence. SO there had to be a magic character to switch from text entry to control mode. And the magic character was an ordinary character, sometimes used for text entry, sometimes interpreted as a command prefix.

Keyboards have changed, but vi hasn't. Computers have mice and touch-sensitive displays, but vi can't exploit them. Operating systems have clipboards, but vi can't take advantage of that convention. You know -- don't get me started.

Or tell me about any editor where the same amount of keystrokes get the same job done.

It's been 5 months since I switched to Emacs. My .emacs.d is actually bigger than .vim_runtime was, but it's because of more configurable features found in Emacs plugins, so it's natural. My init.el is also longer than my .vimrc, but this is because of much friendlier Emacs API and my love for Lisps (and dislike for vimscript). On the whole I'm quite pleased with the switch, although making Emacs into my editor took a comparable amount of time and code to Vim. I don't use Evil or anything like it, of course.

Emacs is better in many respects. CEDET is nice, SpeedBar and imenu with it's syntactic extensions work wonders - TagBar in Vim comes close to SpeedBar, but there's no imenu. auto-complete is better than omni-complete and easier to extend. Eshell works better than conque. Icicles, ido and smex make working with minibuffer a pleasure to the extent that Vim could never match - although it has basic completion of commands. Of course there is more, but the important thing to note here is that, while Emacs implements many things a bit better, Vim has them too. And it's perfectly reasonable to prefer Vim versions. So what I'm saying is that I found Emacs better but Vim is still really great.

Ok, so now to the modality. Emacs lacks modes, Vim has them. Last time we talked you were saying that modes are inefficient and hard to use. I could argue for modality then, but not against it, because I lacked experience with non-modal editor. Now I can compare the two.

The truth is that I was suspicious of non-modal editing in Emacs. I heard and read many rants about long sequences of modifier keys you need to press in order to do something. Turns out these rants where right for the most part. Some examples: C-- C-4 C-x performs hard dedent by four spaces. C-s C-w C-s ... performs incremental search (forward) for current word (Esc # in Vim). C-4 M-f goes four words forward (4w in Vim). There are also tricky ones, like C-x d opening dired and much easier to type C-x C-d displaying a list of files in current directory in a buffer.

In practice, however, with some amount of remapping, this is not an issue. But wait, isn't pressing escape instead of some universal prefix (C-c for user commands in emacs) not a problem in practice, too? After using Emacs and Vim I can say that the complexity of commands in both is almost the same. In Vim I remapped Esc to CapsLock - in Emacs I have Ctrl in place of CapsLock (although I'm contemplating placing Alt there and Ctrl in place of Alt). The only real difference I feel is that in Vim I could just hit the first modifier key (esc) while in Emacs I need to keep it pressed. Emacs uses Alt (Meta), while Vim does not, but that's a little difference, because Alt is usually in a place that's easy to reach.

In conclusion, while I like Emacs very much, I still find your claim that "modal editors" are for sad, handicapped individuals who just don't know any better full of bullshit. Modality is not any worse than modeless model in itself and Vim implements modality in a way which makes using it as convenient as Emacs chords. While there are other things I like in Emacs better, bashing Vim because of modes alone is pure stupidity; bashing it because of it's ancestry is an equivalent of saying that "your mama is fat" and saying it has no X feature is most likely false anyway.

PS. Elsewhere in this thread you're saying that Vim can't use mouse and clipboard. Of course it can - "=y copies to system clipboard instead of local one. I admit that Emacs support for mouse events is by far superior, and of course typesetting - colors, sizes and styles of fonts - are well supported in Emacs and not in Vim. But reaching for the mouse is bad anyway and if you have to, Vim supports all three mouse keys, which only makes the latter a valid claim. It's up to everyone to decide whether they truly need different fonts in their editor.

vim defaults to allowing the cursor keys and delete/backspace.

I mouse around my gvim with my custom font all day long middle click pasting snippets in from the browser.