> I am not convinced that it is possible to come up with a generic sane set of defaults for all apps in a way that would solve the problem of VIM being fundamentally different.

That's not a problem that needs to be solved. "Generic sane set of defaults" excludes vim as an editor by definition.

In terms of which editor should be used by default, vim should not be the default[1].

In terms of keybinding defaults for vim, because vim's modal editing model is so unique, it's totally fine for a universal keybinding system to not trivially integrate with it - just like it's totally fine for libc to not contain every single variant of a memory allocation or string copy function. No abstraction is universal.

> for all apps

Again, a red herring - there's no reason why any programming system has to work "for all the things".

> My point was that "for the majority" is not necessarily the right answer when your system (Linux) is used by a minority.

This is such a vague statement as to be meaningless. How, specifically, are you claiming that Linux users are different from Windows/MacOS users that a different system is needed?

Moreover, given how obviously the design strategy of "sane consistent (but configurable) defaults" fits in to human cognition, I'm very curious as to why you think it somehow doesn't apply to Linux users. If your answer is "they're more technical" - that's irrelevant. Power users and programmers also want user interfaces for new tools to be maximally sane and consistent during their initial learning period, and the configurable afterward. This isn't a Windows/MacOS/Linux thing, this is a human thing.

> Especially because the easiest example (text editors) has huge, obvious counter-examples showing that there is no universal set of defaults to edit text on Linux (nano vs emacs vs vim).

That's because they're obviously not counter-examples. vim and emacs are not the default editor on the majority of user-facing Linux boxes (graphical Ubuntu) - they have to be picked and learned, and most non-technical users that try quit very fast. Those are not even candidates for a set of defaults - those are highly user-hostile specialized programming tools. You know what the default text editor is in Ubuntu? Gedit. Not vim or emacs, not nano or even pico. Gedit. That's the default, and its behavior very closely matches the behavior of the default text editors on Windows and macOS.

Moreover, there is a set of defaults, without a name, that corresponds roughly to what you get in a text field in Firefox. Left-click to place cursor, right-click for context menu, drag-left-click to select region, ctrl-c to copy, etc. You get this behavior in Libreoffice, Gedit, Firefox, Blender, GIMP, various file explorers, random GTK+Qt widgets, and basically everything else except vim, emacs, nano, and the terminal. That is the standard.

As further evidence: the number of people who know how to use ctrl+z/x/c/v (and other standard text-editing shortcuts) outnumbers the combined amount of people who know how to use vim and emacs, by orders of magnitude.

So, yes, there is a set of defaults on Linux. Vim, Emacs, and Nano are not it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34161694