Editor wars. Ugh. | Hacker News Reader

Editor wars. Ugh.

peterevjan.com

11 pointsevjan9 comments

Actualy, I love flamewars like this. You always find new tools, new gems, new tricks and features. Moreover, maybe I am weird but I also like when people argue for their way of doing thing, that's fun.

Ed is the standard text editor![1]

[1] http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

It has a lot of value to sit back, grab some popcorn, and watch the warring comments between camps. It's easy to get stuck in a rut using a tool you know, and these sorts of discussions can yield a look into what other people use, what their process is like, and the pros/cons encountered by somebody who has used it for a while.

For me, and I may be alone on this, editors are strictly a tool used to express thought. I'm going to choose an editor that I enjoy using, not necessarily because it's possible to type and navigate faster. Using tools that I enjoy gives me one less thing to think about when doing what matters: making things.

I don't understand the psychology behind complaining about "pointless HN discussions" while submitting a link to that complaint, which, coincidentally, is on the submitters website. Maybe someone can enlighten me...

In this job, what really makes our car go faster to its destination (using the metaphorical conceit) is the expressiveness of the language, although that is a hard thing to measure.

Editors all have their own language to them, the set of bindings they provide, which can be combined to do what we have in mind. Programmatically re-formatting text (through the use of macros) is one way for an editor to be really expressive. Then, giving an API and a language to actually statefully program your actions can give you even more expressiveness.

My point: language wars and editor wars are one and the same.

"sometimes all the energy and time put into editor discussions dishearten me"

And he wrote a post about it. That's putting a lot of energy, isn't it?

It's interesting how one can feel attached to a sophisticated tool being it just a mean for obtaining something else. It's like these "vim powered" buttons back in the 90s web. Why is that relevant?

What makes you choose a car are your previous habits of interfacing with a car.

I could have the best car in the world on all points, if the driving wheel is a bit too big or a bit too small for my habits and the speed lever is on the left side, I won't even entertain the thought of using it and will commute by skateboard.

What a shitty article. This is the level of discussion it deserves.

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