I think that may be over-generalising a point into irrelevance.
All editors have commands of some kind, yes. Otherwise, it's not an editor.
But holding down a modifier key is not a mode in the software. You could sort of argue it's a mode of the keyboard,. or of the key, but I think it's over reaching.
I've seen editors with no menus, no visible UI at all, just hotkeys that do stuff. It is still a UI even if it is not visible. There are apps for blind Windows users with no visible presence on the screen at all, such as the Qwitter Twitter client.
If pressing the Ctrl key suddenly made the app switch into a different type of operation until you pressed it again, that might count, but it doesn't. The app doesn't even need to know. It just knows "keycodes #F to #Z enter letters, but #A to #E are commands". There are no modes here.
I’m not even sure if the point IS relevant at all. The software-side difference between “the user pressed I, am I in command mode?” and “the user pressed I, did he also press Ctrl?” is not that big.
It's like saying that cars, motorbikes and bicycles were irrelevant, because trains already existed.
A lot of terminal driven software design pivoted around lots of modes. Input mode, edit mode, command mode, extended command mode, etc etc etc. It's powerful but it's very hard to learn and everything becomes very context sensitive. What any key or instruction does depends heavily on what you did before.
That means you have to remember. That means you have to think much more.
The design of second generation GUIs (the Apple Lisa etc.) strove hard to eliminate this totally. The user can do anything at any point without modes of interaction.
The pivotal event that is often missed, and much of the Unix industry even today does not get, is that in the years after the Lisa and the Mac (and, don't forget, their affordable cousins such as the ST, Amiga etc.) appeared, that this stuff then filtered down to DOS and revolutionised DOS apps too.
And those (DOS and DOS apps) were the commercial mainstream, and that ecosystem is what evolved into Windows and all modern computers. Yes including the ones running Linux, and including Linux at the GUI level.
The Mac now is a descendant of NeXT, and is a Unix, remember. It's unrelated to Classic MacOS.
But the UI design of the GUI layer comes directly from Apple R&D. The UI at the shell layer comes from a decade or 2 earlier and is totally different.
Unless you know this, the differences between Unix' and Windows' GUIs and shells makes little sense.
All editors have commands of some kind, yes. Otherwise, it's not an editor.
But holding down a modifier key is not a mode in the software. You could sort of argue it's a mode of the keyboard,. or of the key, but I think it's over reaching.
I've seen editors with no menus, no visible UI at all, just hotkeys that do stuff. It is still a UI even if it is not visible. There are apps for blind Windows users with no visible presence on the screen at all, such as the Qwitter Twitter client.
If pressing the Ctrl key suddenly made the app switch into a different type of operation until you pressed it again, that might count, but it doesn't. The app doesn't even need to know. It just knows "keycodes #F to #Z enter letters, but #A to #E are commands". There are no modes here.