Over the past year or so, I’ve spent a bit of time tinkering with text editors. It feels like I woke up one morning and was simply dissatisfied with what I was currently using. It certainly wasn’t disgust, because I largely like the tools I use. But I felt it was likely there were better tools out there, and that I should give them an honest try. The grass on the other side might be greener.
So I went through liasons with VIM and a couple with Emacs. The first left me feeling disconnected, like I had ideas but I couldn’t even make them appear on the screen, let alone run. My experiences with Emacs are better, but have always felt somewhat awkward. I suspect that at some point, I could be a full-blown Emacs person, but right now, I’m just an aspirational Emacs guy.
I’ve used a myriad of editors in my time. I started with jed, a small-ish Emacs clone, then graduated to full-on Emacs. By way of viper, I migrated to VIM. Then I picked up BBEdit, because I wanted more direct manipulation of text, and less of a never-ending learning curve. I was pretty quick to jump on TextMate, seeing a great fusion of the Mac and Unix aesthetics.
I still think TextMate is as close as it gets to an ideal situation. And yet, it falls short enough that I tinker with VIM and Emacs, two editors that can easily be labeled powerful but extremely lacking in the visual and conceptual aesthetics departments.
I suspect my mismatch with most of these editors is due to something about my habits, the way I like to work with programs, and the kinds of programs I work with. Emacs’ notions of major and minor modes doesn’t play well with markup files with three different languages embedded within. VIM is efficient for those who have internalized it and hostile to everyone else. TextMate is easy to get started with and pleasant to extend up to a point, but seems to have fallen victim to its creator’s perfectionism.
For a long time, I’ve adhered to the philosophy that one should choose one text editor and learn as much about it as possible. Increasingly, I’m starting to think that there is no panacea, no "one true editor". TextMate is great for working on web apps and easy to extend. Emacs is really wonderful for functional programming languages, especially those with REPLs and languages that are LISP-shaped. And some kinds of development demand an environment more like Smalltalk browsers than text editors.
My journey for editing bliss probably won’t end anytime soon. In the future, I suspect that it’s going to be a spectrum of tools depending on the work I’m doing. It could be that the days of personal text editing monoculture are over.
