A while ago I wrote about becoming the maintainer of God mode, the package that gives you modal editing in Emacs without abandoning Emacs key bindings. I still maintain it, but I no longer use it.

To be clear: I didn't leave God mode because there's anything wrong with it. I left because of where the rest of my configuration wanted to go. I'd also used Vim for years before I switched to Emacs, so this was less a conversion than a relapse.

I stumbled across Practical Vim a couple of years ago, which tempted me to daily-drive vi key bindings in Emacs. Doom Emacs already had a module for Evil, and with its +everywhere flag I was able to use Evil in modes where I'd previously had to disable God mode. Yes, I'm mostly talking about Magit. I could have kept God mode alongside Evil, but never needed to.

Switching my Doom Emacs configuration to Evil removed more than twice as much configuration as it added. That's not a criticism of God mode - it's just that almost all of the Doom Emacs modules are designed around a leader key.

Then I discovered lispyville, and I stopped using God mode entirely. I write a lot of Clojure and Emacs Lisp, and structural editing that understands Evil states turned out to fit my hands better than the paredit key theme I'd previously been using in lispy. Navigating between sexps and parentheses while slicing and dicing them without ever leaving normal mode feels like a superpower. lispy's default bindings are also great for the same actions in insert mode, and they seldom need a modifier key.

The obvious question is whether I should still be maintaining God mode. I believe the answer is yes, and it's for the same reason I wrote about last time: being a maintainer is mostly not about having strong opinions on the feature set. It's about getting out of the way of the people who do use it every day. God mode is also one of those packages that doesn't need a lot of code churn since its core implementation is solid.

And it still has one advantage over Evil: its bindings are Emacs bindings, so there's less to learn up front, and the muscle memory works on any Emacs you sit down at.

Modal editing in Emacs is not a competition. It's a preference, and you're free to choose your own.