Thoughts On A Text Editor

Jeremy Friesen has some thoughts on what hopes and expects is his last text editor: Emacs. He’s been using Emacs only since 2020 so he probably can’t yet be described as a journeyman Emacs user but he is an experienced developer and knows about editors and what makes a good one.

Along the way, he tried JEdit, Textmate, Sublime Text, Atom, Vim, and VS Code but none of them worked for him. Emacs, of course, is famously flexible so he was able to make it fit his workflow rather than the other way around.

Friesen also reminds us—in the context of VS Code—of Microsoft’s longstanding policy of “embrace, extend, extinguish”. That’s the policy of embracing some open standard, extending it in proprietary ways, and when they reach critical mass, using their market dominance to destroy the open standard or software. That’s the same problem that I wrote about in Red Meat Friday: VS Code As A Venus Flytrap.

But VS Code is really beside the point. We Emacsers use Emacs because it’s the best editor for our workflows. We may feel sorry for VS Code users and fear that they’ll learn about Microsoft’s behavior the hard way but we don’t obsess about it anymore than we obsess about Nano.

Regardless, take a look at Friesen’s philosophical post on what makes a good editor and why Emacs satisfies his needs.

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