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by StevePerkins 2152 days ago
> developers are investing in workflows

If this discussion were about anything other than text editors, I would take it much more seriously. But text editor popularity cycles every 5 years or so, and the main reason is simply that we get bored and want to try something new.

When we "invested" in VSCode over the past few years, we discarded all of our previous investments in Sublime workflows.

When we invested in Sublime back in the early-2010's, we discarded our previous investments in TextMate or Notepad++.

When we invested in TextMate or Notepad++ in the mid-2000's, we discarded our previous investments in UltaEdit or God knows what.

When we invested in UltraEdit or God known what back around the turn of the century, we discarded our previous investments in Vi or Emacs or Nano or whatever we were using from the shell in our 1990's computer science classes.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. We'll be bored with VSCode by mid-decade... and when we migrate to the next thing, it will take us a matter of days.

1 comments

Agreed that many developers do this. I'm very averse to relearning all my tooling every couple of years, though, so I tend to treat FOSS very seriously because my investment will last decades. This makes me a bit of an outlier, but it's the reason I invested in building skills in GNU tools, Linux, and Emacs in the 90s, and continue to use those tools every day. For people like me, VSCode is not a great choice, for all the reasons you suggest. For most, I agree that the stakes aren't quite as high, simply because folks are switching tools from time to time for other reasons anyway.