Things a text editor must do | Hacker News Reader

Things a text editor must do

theregister.co.uk

45 pointsdavweb39 comments

Before you all get too angry about the scandalous lies about your favorite editor note that this is a Verity Stob column. If you're reading it for a sober, fair-minded review of the various tradeoffs involved in the very serious business of text editing, you're doing it wrong.

All I've taken from this page of comments is that HN users have no sense of humour.

Any attack on Vim or Emacs is blasphemy and must be resisted!! No, calm down.

I'm not sure how someone can read past

   ...press Ctrl + Shift + L (if you are following along on your Mac, just press squiggle squoggle shift Home)

and not pick up that this is satire, or perhaps just plain humo(u)r.

It's so obviously satire - I mean, which Mac has a Home button amirite?

My Apple keyboard has a 'Home' key...

http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/...

(And of course, all iOS devices have a 'Home' button.)

It's (meant to be) a humour column as any attempt to read TFA would reveal. Anyone taking it seriously, or worse taking offence, is either illiterate or an idiot.

The article could've been titled "I hate emacs for no particular reason". It's probable more accurate.

> It turns out that my brain was only fitted with 72 bytes of "finger memory"; furthermore it turns out to be EPROM, not Flash. I need to wipe out all the WordStar keystrokes from 1986 (Ctrl+Y to delete a line, anyone?) before I can add any more, and I have lost the ultra-violet wiping-out gadget (ask your dad) needed to achieve this.

If he'd taken a look at the Zeus editor he would have found all the features mention (except the multi-cursor thing) and by selecting the WordStar key mapping, he wouldn't even have to erase the EPROM in his fingers.

Jussi Jumppanen

Author: Zeus

Verity Stob is a laaaadddddy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_Stob

My apologies to Verity for the gender error.

I must say this isn't nearly as funny as much of the Verity Stob posts, but no problem.

Mostly I was amazed to see that the same horrible bug in Notepad++ that seriously bit me once (the text replacement buffer silently truncated... aargh!) is the one mentioned here.

It's hard to beat her history of computing, "8086 and all that"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/22/verity_stob_8086_and...

I'm often taken a bit back by how bad text looks in screenshots of Windows whatever. I really wouldn't want to look at that all day. Just my preference...

It's ok - we feel the same about OSX font rendering.

I like Sublime, but I think it's criminal that it can't show line endings. That's right up there with syntax highlighting in my list of must-have features. How often do line endings screw you? Since I tend to work on a lot of cross platform stuff, for me, it's all the time. I pretty much keep Notepad++ around just so I can pop things into it to look at their line endings.

I'm pretty sure you can turn that on. Though I think it shows all whitespace characters unless he's changed some more recently.

This should solve your problem: https://github.com/SublimeText/LineEndings

"Another giveaway [of Sublime's Mac influences]: Sublime comes with a set of colour schemes with names like Dawn, Expresso Libre, Monokai, Slush & Poppies and the Smell of Napalm in the Morning (I may have made one of those up).

Contrast this with an equivalent list from a Windows product (in fact Delphi VCL skins): Carbon, Charcoal Dark Slate, Emerald Light Slate, Golden Graphite, Slate Classico and Dark Beige Slate Classico Carbon (I may have made one of those up)."

To me, the second list comes off as more Mac themed. Carbon is a set of Mac APIs, Charcoal was the system font for Mac OS 8, and Graphite was the nickname of the Power Mac G4.

As for the first list, OS X has a desktop picture of poppies and Expresso[sic] could be Java inspired (like Cocoa, Gianduia, Espresso, Chocolat, Cappuccino, etc.) I doubt Apple would call anything 'Libre' in their English branding or documentation.

Well. At least he was pretty clear this was all his opinion.

But that's a couple of minutes of my life I'd like to get back.

I'm soOOooo glad I learned ed as my first editor which lead to a 30 year love affair with vi. Both of those editors sound painful to use.

OTOH Vimscript is painful to use compared to Python...

That's a feature, instead of customizing your text editor you spend your time coding the thing you originally wanted to code.

Heh, that's true. But most Vim users also want customization, as shown by bundles like http://vim.spf13.com/.

For a pythonista, maybe.

True. But it's something I really only have to do when switching languages and frameworks.

"No support for Object Pascal ... minus 1 million points"

"How can I possibly use this as an IDE for theregister.co.uk backend systems when it doesn't support object pascal"

Get off my lawn! What smells like Mustard? The president is a demi-crat!

I will say TexPad is an amazing editor (as long as you don't need to do any unicode). Like verity I've been using it for many many years, and I have yet to find a replacement that I enjoy as much.

When I switched to Linux, I tried to learn all kinds of emacs and vi, and never enjoyed them as much. LightTable seems like it will finally answer my prayers, however.

For an article that prefaces it's dialogue with a desire to "leave the right-thinking reader with an impression of calm, reasoned rationality", it reads like opinionated tosh. How the author arrived at these six criteria as a reasonable litmus test for the applicability and usefulness of a text editor absolutely boggles the mind.

Verity is usually satirical; at best he's overblown and ridiculous. I don't think the Reg's editorial staff expects you to take this as gospel, it's mostly for entertainment value.

Probably by starting with the idea of writing an article gushing about sublime and working backwards in an attempt to not appear biased :p

> right-thinking reader

This should have been your cue; "right-thinking" as a term is right up there with "modest proposal."

Sublime Text 3 fixes most of the problems mentioned in the article. It starts up fast, handles large files better. Still no option to show newline characters.

Sublime is generally great, but it desperately needs one fix before I'll ever really love it: make page up/down commutative.

What an opinionated piece of crap TFA is. This kind of stuff is precisely why I stopped reading The Reg a long time ago.

Seriously:

"4. The editor should contain no implementation of Lisp."

Why do they do that? Because of course Emacs totally rocks in their last example, where you need to apply the same modification to various lines (in Emacs you'd probably use a macro repeating some search and replace using a quick Lisp substitution).

How do you even want to talk with people who argue for their own limitation?

Appeal to authority: I urge people to read "Beating the average" from pg.

That's fine because emacs has been an implementation of lisp that contains an editor for years now.

Elisp is why I love emacs so much, especially given that I get that all that power in a console.

Editor wars are editor wars I guess. People just need an excuse to write about something it seems. I think the only prereq for a good editor is that it should be free, and nothing more. Everything else is a matter of preference.

It's a joke!

How is it possible, given the URL, that it's the Reg, the author's name, the layout and the content to miss that it's a joke?

This particular line is a reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule

In this house, we obey Poe's law!

    -------> the joke
       0
      /|\      you
      / \

He wants to test text editors, not programming environments or IDEs. He makes that quite explicit.

By the way, I'm an emacs fan.

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