A Theory of Text Editors

When I started working with LINUX, I used GNU emacs. At the time, I was using some low-end hardware, even for the time. One day, I realized that my morning routine was to boot up, start emacs, and make a cup of coffee while I waited for emacs to wake up in the morning. That was insane. There was a lot I liked about emacs, but I needed something lighter weight. So I switched to Vim, and I still use it for all my editing needs. Vim messes with your brain. Once you've internalized the keystrokes, you're ruined for other editors. In the past, I would sometimes think that I needed to enter the 20th century and try some other editor—Eclipse, jEdit, or something. I'd install whatever it was I planned on using and tweaked it out, but I only used it at most a day, and the entire time I'd be thinking, "I could do this so much more quickly in Vim." Finally, I'd switch back just to make myself shut up. Of course, to really test drive a text editor, you need to give it a few weeks, so I never gave any of these a fair shake. I even tried viper once. This was a mode in emacs that used vi keystrokes and commands. I only used it about thirty minutes. It was too confusing. I remember the emacs keystrokes enough that I couldn't never quite decide whether I should use them or vi. I was less productive with it than I was with emacs by itself. My theory is that there are two levels to text editing: High-level semantics and low level syntax. I'll be abusing both of these terms, so let me explain what I mean by them. If you're editing Java or C# or Python or Lisp, semantics involves the libraries you're using. What properties does a Button have? What arguments does socket.socket take? Which comes first in elt, the index or the sequence? Eventually, if you use the language and its libraries enough, these questions go away. The other level is syntax. This involves editing at the character level: entering text, copying, pasting, moving, search-and-replace. This never goes away. In my experience, most IDEs are great at the semantic level, but poor at the syntactic level. They will answer any questions you have about the libraries and the language, but if you have to a sequence of keystrokes 1000 times, it is painful. Usually possible, but painful. On the other hand, Vim is brain dead at semantic stuff. At the syntactic level, however, once the keystrokes have branded themselves onto your brain, no other editor comes close. It tells you nothing about the objects, methods, or functions that you're using, but if you have to repeat something 1000 times, bang, you're done. So what's the point? Well, this posting actually started out as a discussion of editing lisp. It seems to have gotten derailed though. Lisp will have to wait for tomorrow.