I guess my point was not really clear then. I wanted to point out that vim's "command" mode is not optimal because when you use it, you'll use the substitute command 90% of the time. This might be more visible if you compare sam to ed or sed, which are not visual editors.

Of course vim's normal mode is better for the changes I listed, but I wanted to make a point about sam's commands being more powerful than vim's commands.

This is the whole point of this post: using vim with sam's command mode makes it a better editor !