Text Editors Should Be Worse

Ha! I was prepared to disagree, thinking "nah, I generally like smart features like block select and block indent/comment, but auto-quotation belongs in the pits of hell."

Turns out TFA is a rant about auto-quotation. I withdraw my objection. I would gladly sacrifice all other smart features in this hypothetical world where I could eliminate auto-quotation with the same blow. This world is not that world, but one can dream. Carry on!

This is a bad idea. You just need to find an editor configurable enough that you can get it to work the way you want. No need to drag everything down to the lowest common denominator.

> Let's take a concrete example: typing a quoted string. My go-to input sequence is to type " " [left], i.e., typing two quotes at once and then moving the cursor back into the middle of the two, ready to type the string itself: "|".

That's quirky, but works fine in VSCode (where auto-closing quotes is also configurable). I wonder what editor(s) the author was thinking of?

This rant could've easily been written by me. I have a very strong mental model of what should happen when I press keys on the keyboard, and when that diverges from what's visible on the screen everything in my brain grinds to a halt because my "you made a typo" alarms go off.

I can't comfortably use JetBrains products because they're really bad about letting you actually disable these things. VSCode extensions also love to add their own little settings that don't respect the higher level ones. Visual Studio previews somewhat frequently ship new "helpers" like this without a way to disable them (to their credit though, they do quickly add one once you point it out.)

I too wish more apps offered a top-level "disable everything unless I explicitly enable it" setting. Figuring out where the individual settings are buried only exasperates the frustration.

The auto-quotation in jupyter-notebook (codemirror?) drives me bonkers. I certainly sympathise with the author.

Hah, thats nice rant really. For example, I could not myself use new ViM version. They are so annoying. Trying to be smarter that me, auto add this, move cursor here, etc... And im not even sure how to turn that crap off. So instead I ended up using good old version of ViM I know and I dont bother upgrading :)

Editors could be even smarter and detect that you typed the quote twice and print it only twice (replace the double “” end quotes with a single “). Most of the time this would probably be fine, but I guess there might be corner cases that I haven’t thought about.

Well-written and fun piece, but I don't share OP's appetite for universal text editing unity.

> I hate context switching. I want my input sequences to always work, no matter what software I'm using.

Context switching is a skill, and an increasingly important one. To use the example of this essay, I certainly don't expect to have the same response to my input if I'm using PyCharm full-tilt as I do with an HTML <textarea>, and I expect both of these to be different from a coloring book I'm sharing with my child.

The differences in these interfaces are highly valuable, and the cost of enjoying each of them is relatively small in that it requires the maintenance of the mental (and sometimes physical) skill of context switching.

To apply a bit of reductio ad absurdum: if this were globally and successfully applied through the realms of technology, even unto genetic and geological engineering, we'd expect a car, a lover, a mountainside, and an HTML <textarea> to share the same context and afford for the same muscle memory.

(If this sounds like too far a reach for a comparison, please pause and ponder for a moment just how _diverse_ text input has become in your life, across all of your devices and apps, with all of your relations both human and computer. Now consider that this diversity is likely to grow in ways that are difficult to imagine in the years to come.)

Even if this is somehow abstractly possible (and obviously we can't even imagine what it looks like from here), is it desirable? Is there something so important about avoiding context-switching that we'd be willing to forego the diversity of joy that arises from interacting with the elements of life differently?

Of course I assert that the answer is 'no', but I think that it's obvious even in the realm of text editors. I love having copilot in my IDE, but there's no way I'd want it in a <textarea> subject to the whims of javascript I might have forgotten to disable. Similarly, I'm happy to have a web application respond in reasonable ways to keystroke events that I enter in a text area, but I don't want that for my CLI. Etc, etc.

tl;dr: Context switching is a skill that requires work, but it's worth the richness it empowers.

P.S. I actually like quote-completion. ;-)

Wait, so are they asking for nano or Emacs? Either way, their solution already exists.