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Comment by tjogin | Hacker News Reader

If you are capable of switching editors, what does it matter if it's closed source or not?

This adversity to switching editors is a common trait in programmers I can't quite understand. We programmers learn new things all the time, it's part of what makes us excel in our profession. And yet, adopting a new editor is apparently extremely hard.

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Perhaps it feels extremely hard because a preferred programming environment is so deeply tied to muscle memory via key bindings (which, admittedly, Vico is trying to address for vi users), whereas learning other new things engages other more flexible parts of the brain.

Because learning new editors takes away from time we could be coding.

Learning new tools to use, new techniques to employ, new languages to express yourself, new environments to deploy in, new projects to hack on ... and for devops, new daemons to configure, new setups to benchmark ... these are the vast majority of a working programmer's time so switching editors is trivial in comparison.

Arguing against something because it takes away coding time is a sign that you probably need to broaden your experience.

I am primarily a Textmate user as I do a lot of Ruby, Rails, and web work, but a while back when I started learning Lisp I felt compelled to use Emacs. I was some of the most fun I've ever had. And I would contend that extending, customizing Emacs with .el files is a form of coding.

Yes, but I'm extremely lazy :) The less time I spend learning a new editor is more time I can spend learning a new technology.

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