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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I'm your opposite. I use Pages for letter writing, Word for documentation, PyCharm for Python, Visual Studio for C++, VSCode for Javascript, Outlook for email, vi for bash and config files, SublimeText for markdown and html, OneNote for todos and project planning, Obsidian for my work log and outlines, the Notes app for on-the-go capture, etc...

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This is the way.

For a community that prides itself on "one small tool for a specific purpose," people sure like to use VIM for a thousand different purposes by hacking plugins. This used to be derided as the microsoft way decades ago.

For writing prose, I use an app specifically designed for writing prose: Scrivener. See elsewhere saying "you should change how you write in order to use version control when writing prose." Totally forgetting that there's been a version control for prose for literal decades: tracking changes in a word processor.

Do you want to process words? Use a word processor. Not a text editor. Writing prose isn't editing text.

The thing is, in this context "editing text" is seen as the one job, that one tool should do.

So when you're working with multiple applications, all of which are trying to force you to use their own way of editing text, it feels highly fragmented and un-unixy

I do understand what you're saying, it's just that I wish the text editing portion of most of these tools is abstracted to a degree that allows for my text-editing tool of choice to be used within it

This doesn't have to be the way. I write documents using typst, with the occasional latex document sprinkled in by necessity. Not everybody needs a WYSIWYG editor. Most of them are WYGIWYG anyway. You're free to use whatever tools you like, but claiming that something is _the_ way would be absurd. And if you like little bloat, a system that just works across many domains, you don't need 100 different "apps" that each try to implement the features you get when chaining together the coreutils.

> For a community that prides itself on "one small tool for a specific purpose," people sure like to use VIM for a thousand different purposes by hacking plugins. This used to be derided as the microsoft way decades ago.

I'm not sure that this is the meaning of the slogan. The slogan says that a programmer shouldn't try to make one tool to do all things, not, I think, that users shouldn't be given the freedom to adapt their favorite tool to do all the things that they want to do. (Imagine, for example, if one applied this understanding of the slogan to C, and regretted the thousand and thousand thousand different purposes to which users were putting it!)

My issue is that word processors mostly amount to bad typesetting tools. Your editor doesn't need configurable document margins or page numbers. Semantic styling should be visible but unobtrusive, e.g. markdown.

If I were a Mac user, I'd probably use iA Writer. Instead, I'm very happy with Sublime. I appreciate Scrivener's bells and whistles but I find I never need more than documents, folders, and headings (although I wouldn't say no to Obsidian-style wikilinks).

Yeah, I do think different uses require different editors. I write novels, and Scrivener works better for me than iA writer. I used Sublime as a code editor a decade or so ago, but never for anything more.

> For a community that prides itself on "one small tool for a specific purpose,"

You think this "community" is a tech community? Let alone a unix community? And using a text editor for text processing is definitely aligned with the "unix way" than your way.

> This used to be derided as the microsoft way decades ago.

No. Your way was derided as the microsoft way. The unix way was to treat everything as text! Programs/processes feed/pipe text to each other.

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