michael_nielsen

In fact, one of my big principles is that we should MODE ALL THE THINGS People get too caught up in religious debates at the extremes when you can solve for just about anything by having different "modes", that clearly signal mindsets and desired outcomes;

Modalities in software are often inconvenient and/or difficult to use (page preview v edit, read-only, slide show). Only people that like VI like modes :-)

why can't we toggle views as a simple frontend thing that masks the difficulty underneath? (kinda like the good ole trick of letting users think they're *customizing* something... but they're really just *configuring* it;)

That's how it gets solved and what is annoying. Often there are differences. A great example of a bad modality like that is tablet/touch mode in Windows. Essentially it is always wrong.

I hear you. I just want the solution and don't care how! Also: why are docs & collaborative workflows around them still so darn hard?? I use a ridic hybrid of plain text, Gdocs, Word (yes have tried many of the newfangled web-native ones too, none solve my problems all in one)

Larry Tesla has a nice article explaining some of his opposition to modes. It's not entirely convincing, but there's quite a bit of useful thinking in it: https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2012/a-personal-history-of-modeless-text-editing-and-cut-copy-paste …