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by alttab 5080 days ago
Does anyone else feel like if we spent all the time masterbating about our text editor writing software instead in something that just works the world would have better software? The amount of text editor posts I see on HN lately is astonishing.

The less emphasis we put on tools the more we can rely on skill. We should all just use notepad for a year and see what all that extra time produces.

2 comments

You learn vim / emacs very well once, you use them for the rest of your life. It's time well invested.
I use vim. That's kinda my point when it comes to see fancy GUI editors. Even with vim, here are the only commands I use regularly: n, b, dw, dd, u, w, :/, home, end, and :wq.

Coupled with Grep -r, I literally use nothing else. My productivity is not bound by how fast I can use vim, but how much effort it takes me to understand the real problem I'm trying to solve.

If everyone else worries about how they can jump around code more than actually decomposing the true motivation behind their work, they are either unbounded geniuses, or far more likely, writing a lot of code that could be completely avoided. All of these bells and whistles distracts from the problem, and focuses on code instead of problem solving. This worries me. Especially when at the end of the day all we are talking about is how fast we can introduce bugs into the code base or writing code that doesn't help the customer directly.

Why so fancy? Just COPY CON.