Haldar On Editors

Vivek Haldar published a list of his most popular posts of 2012 and one that I particularly liked was My Setup. In that post, I found this quote about editors exactly right.

Editors

This is where the religious wars usually start. And rightfully so. If,
like me, your digital life mostly revolves around text, then you need
to have a religious fervor for your text editor. When I meet a geek
who does not feel strongly about their choice of text editor (or
worse, uses notepad or gedit), all my “fake geek” alarms go off. As
far as software goes, this is the centerpiece of the entire set up.

You know what’s coming–Emacs and vi–those are the only serious
contenders. I have some measure of objectivity here, because I have
used both for a number of years, and feel comfortable with either. In
the end, I fell towards the Emacs camp. What finally tipped me over
was the customizability. People keep talking about the look and the
key bindings and how many keystrokes it takes to do something. But all
that is not important. What is important is whether you can make this
editor your own. In the final analysis, Emacs is not really a text
editor, but a platform on which to build your workflows. It just
happens to be really good at text.

But–I’m not advocating a particular editor here. It really doesn’t
matter which one you end up with. What does matter though is that you
are a power user of it. It should feel like second nature to you. You
should have no trouble making it do your bidding. It should make you
feel powerful and light and frictionless. When people look over your
shoulder at you going about your work with it, it should look like an
incomprehensible buzz to them.

His experience pretty much parallels mine except that I switched from Vim to Emacs because I started programming in Lisp. Once I made the switch, though, I found the customizability to be a huge win. In any event, I agree with everything he says in the above quote.

A couple months ago I wrote about another of Haldar’s posts on editing, New frontiers in text editing, which is also interesting. If you’re a What the .emacs.d!? fan, you’ll recognize the beginning and ending quotes from that post. Haldar is generally interesting so you might want to subscribe. I do.

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