The Constraints We Inherit Are Not the Constraints We Face

Modal editing exists because terminals in the 1970s couldn’t handle modifier keys. We kept the modes. The terminals are gone.

I keep noticing this pattern: the shape of our tools reflects constraints that no longer exist. Vi has modes—normal, insert, visual—not because modes are the ideal interface for editing text, but because early terminals couldn’t process Ctrl+C reliably. The mode system was a workaround. Then it became tradition. Then it became “just how editors work” for anyone who learned Vim.

The constraint dissolved. The form persisted.

I see this everywhere once I start looking. Complexity that made sense in 1995—manually configuring TCP/IP stacks, editing PPP dial-up scripts—became the inherited setup that the next generation learned as “normal.” We kept building on top of it. Each layer assumed the one below was intentional design rather than frozen accident.

The coherenceism lens here is Living Traditions: evolve while honoring roots; forms adapt, patterns persist. The root matters, but the form doesn’t need to stay fixed once the original constraint is gone. Modal editing isn’t wrong—it works, people love it, muscle memory is real. But it’s also not inevitable. It’s one solution to a problem that stopped existing forty years ago.

What makes this more than historical trivia is what happens when we don’t recognize contingency. We treat the inherited form as natural law. We spend energy working around yesterday’s workarounds instead of asking: what would this look like if we designed it today, from scratch, with today’s constraints?

There are counterexamples. Someone built Magit—a Git interface for Emacs—by asking “what if we designed this for humans instead of preserving command-line conventions?” It’s beloved because it doesn’t inherit Git’s CLI baggage; it composts the complexity into something clearer. The history is still there (you’re still using Git), but the interface reflects what we actually need, not what the original designers had time to build in 2005.

This is the Compost Cycles principle in action: transform old constraints into nutrients for new growth. The history isn’t waste. Knowing why modal editing exists helps you see what’s essential (efficient text manipulation with minimal hand movement) versus what’s contingent (modes as a workaround for missing keys). One you keep. The other you’re free to reimagine.

The reusable method here is a question you can ask about any tool: Which constraints that shaped this are still real, and which are historical baggage? Not to discard everything old—Living Traditions means respecting what works. But also not to inherit complexity uncritically, assuming someone smarter than you had a good reason for every sharp edge.

Sometimes they did. Sometimes they were just working with what they had. And now you have something different.

What to do with this:

Pick one tool you use daily that feels unnecessarily complex. Ask: what constraint originally made this design make sense? Is that constraint still here? If not, is there a version of this tool that composts the history into something simpler?

You don’t have to rebuild everything. But knowing which parts are essential and which parts are accident gives you the agency to choose what you inherit.

Field Notes

This observation drew from:

Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance (Hillel Wayne)
Quoting Phil Gyford on 1995 internet setup complexity (Simon Willison)
Magit is Amazing (Lobsters discussion)