a good programming text editor (not IDE)

[Tim Daneliuk]

Istvan Albert wrote:
> Scott David Daniels wrote:
> 
>> To paraphrase someone else (their identity lost in my mental fog) about
>> learning VI:
>>      "The two weeks you'll spend hating vi (or vim) as you learn it will
>>       be repaid in another month, ad the rest is pure profit."
> 
> Time and again I hear this (no shortage of Vim fans, same with Emacs),
> and I know I should know better but always believe them yet again.
> Invariably I download Vim play with it for an hour, get increasingly
> frustrated and give up. Most likely I'm greatly spoiled by using

This is not a skill or competence issue - it is a mindset issue.
Some people are naturally more comfortable with point-n-shoot
GUI interfaces.  Some of us old retrograde dinosaurs imagine GUIs
to be a place to run multiple xterms so we can use the keyboard
even more.  That said, to the extent you learn to master the keyboard
with any tool, you will eventually become far more efficient doing
almost everything you do.  I find GUI editors/browsers/et al easy
to learn or good for casual use, but an interference when I want
to do a lot fast.  I got so frustrated with it all, I wrote my
own pure Python file browser that is *all* about the keyboard and
never having to say you're a mouse user (though you can):

<Shameless Self-Promotion>

   http://www.tundraware.com/Software/twander/

</Shameless Self-Promotion>


GUIs are great for two classes of use: 1) For non-specialist or casual
users who need to be productive with minimal training or support, and
2) Classes of problems that are inherently graphical - photo editing
is such an example.  But, I have yet to see a significant advantage
to programming under a GUI (beyond the aforementioned ability to run
multiple instances of emacs, xterm ...).  Yes, a GUI editor is easy to
*learn* and use casually, but text intensive work is best done with
tools optimized for doing so.

BTW, when God created the heavens and earth, the OS was BSD Unix, the
config files were edited with emacs, and the doc was written in LaTeX
using the dvi2stonetablets backend...


-- 
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Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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