Modeless User Interface

Larry Tesler died. He's a champion of Modeless User Interface.

Lawrence Gordon Tesler (April 24, 1945 to February 16, 2020) was an American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!

While at PARC, Tesler's work included Smalltalk, the first dynamic object-oriented programming language, and Gypsy, the first word processor with a graphical user interface for the Xerox Alto. During this, along with colleague Tim Mott, Tesler developed the idea of copy and paste functionality and the idea of modeless software. While at Apple, Tesler worked on the Apple Lisa and the Apple Newton, and helped to develop Object Pascal and its use in application programming toolkits including MacApp.

[2020-02-20 Wikipedia Larry Tesler]

Mode vs no mode, i dont tink there's a universal best answer. Life is full of modes. e.g. When u swith from mac to win to linux, 3 diff modes. When in browser or in text editor, 2 diff modes. Img editor, vid editor, are diff modes too. Almost every app is its own mode. Twitter, instgram, tiktok, fb, all diff modes. Driving car, bike, motorbike, scooter, walk, running, diff modes! Even in a single browser, there are modes. Your keystroke or mouse click behaves differently depending the current focus area. e.g. In text box, in tab, in menu, etc.

and your cell phone, is all about modes.

more philosophy of GUI Linux: Shell Commands for GUI Apps