Sublime Text as an Arduino IDE

Better text editors (at the time especially) were complicated learning projects themselves. Having a brain-dead editor with a couple buttons that just works (even if editing is not extra powerful) is a feature in the design case - total n00bs learning.

When new folks show up at the local makerspace the most common thing we encounter are people with no electronics and no coding experience. Their computer experience has been fairly non-technical up to then. Getting them up to speed on blinking a light already requires and intro to electronics and an intro to coding, kind of overwhelming for them to begin with. Requiring a "deep IT" dive to have extra editor-fu and installing toolchains etc would probably be too much, and we'd never get repeats.

Also worth noting: Arduino didn't invent their own IDE. They used an existing one - the same one that Processing uses. It's the wiring IDE/editor, so it was around prior to Arduino.

The history of the UX of the arduino editor, came from wiring, which came from processing, which came from Design By Numbers ( http://dbn.media.mit.edu/whatisdbn.html ).

One of the surviving ideas was that this is an editor for beginners, to the point of having a smaller window was less intimidating, that it made the code seem like a sketch, and more encouraged playful experimentation.

This is my short, incomplete understanding of why the window is small when you open arduino/processing.

> I'm not sure why Arduino decided to reinvent a text editor

They didn't, they repurposed the editor developed for Processing ( https://processing.org/ ).

> instead of focusing on a plugin for a better text editor.

Which cross platform editor should they have focused on in 2005?

There's also PlatformIO which is cross-platform as well as multi-platform (AVR being a supported platform). It's based on Atom (kind of like a super plugin): http://platformio.org