

Thank you for this! Questioning and considering one’s gender is such a valuable thing for both trans and cis people, I’d like to say that anyone in this process of self-discovery is a hatching egg. And just like a hatching egg, the best thing you can do is to give it a supportive environment and plenty of time.
Modal editing for just raw text input would actually be slower, because you also enter and leave Insert Mode. I find it’s very fast and powerful for navigating around the text, which you probably do a lot more than actually editing it. And when it does come to editing, there are a lot of higher-level tools (at least in Vim) for accomplishing things more quickly, like the ‘s’ command and ‘q’ macros.
I think getting into a mental “flow” state is really valuable, and muscle memory is important for being able to stay there. If your muscle memory is to navigate around using the mouse, that’s great, but Vim feels faster to me.