I sort of disagree with this: once I’ve internalized the gestures, I really appreciate the lack of UI for them. It’s like vim and emacs: the sparse ui creates a steeper learning curve but becomes a feature once you’ve learned the tool
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Your average dev who's never used vim or vi will start frustrated by default.
The other important thing is learning to fit into the conventions of the platform: for example, Cocoa apps on Mac all inherit a bunch of consistent behaviors.
Being a modal editor probably makes removing all persistent chrome more feasible.