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Comment by Litruv | Hacker News Reader

I think you missed the point of edit.

I think not. Edit is to edit files in the terminal. What kind of files do you expect people to edit in the terminal? Most certainly files that would benefit from colors, not prose.

A lot of authors, myself included, want a "distraction free" editor. Its a whole over-populated market segment.

Prose thrives in the terminal. Ice and Fire was written in WordStar, as just one popular example.

Is that why the series ground to a halt

> “I’m 12 years late on this damn novel, and I’m struggling with it,” he said. “I have like 1,100 pages written, but I still have hundreds more pages to go. It’s a big mother of a book for whatever reason. Maybe I should’ve started writing smaller books when I began this, but it’s tough.”

He's averaging a hundred pages a year. Maybe not the fastest, but certainly not the slowest writer. With the size of his books... Cut the guy some slack.

> 12 years late

Seems like people have cut him a lot of slack already. Of course he doesn’t really owe anything to anybody, but at some point he and everyone else has to face the reality - which is that if that book is ever published, it’ll be posthumously, finished by a ghostwriter.

Rachel Kroll once posted that she writes her posts in nano, with the distraction of syntax highlighting turned off: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/09/24/editor/

I can't find the link but I think at some point she compiled her own nano with some "helpful" feature patched out again.

I met someone recently that still uses WordStar. Yes I'm serious. He runs it in QEMU on FreeDOS. He's a writer for a living.

George R.R. Martin still uses Wordstar as well!

Sure, there are always exceptions but they're only that, exceptions.

I think you're assuming people who are thinking of going beyond the original "point" of edit missed that point. We didn't. We're looking new directions it can go.

I think you missed the question I was answering in my comment.

There's an underlying assumption about "target audience for this editor" that you both share, that others, I suspect quite a few others, do not.

For starters, there's your assumption that there is "syntax" to be highlighted. Not every text file is something written in a computer programming language.

You're right, I do assume most (90+%? of) people that are looking for a terminal editor are likely developers.

In fact I'd put money on it, but sadly do not have any evidence to back it up.

If you have evidence to the contrary I'd be intrigued!

You might not be wrong about percentages, but there are famously some Emacs users who for into it for Org mode or academic writing, including even some who learned to program long to better customize their Emacs setup and eventually became contributors.

But these are amateur geeks or geeks in the making who probably don't mind having the capability of syntax highlighting built in, even if for some purposes they want it turned off.

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