Nothing and More

It is quite an interesting event to see that still in 2008 people are fighting and searching for the perfect editor, things have certainly change from when I started programming, in those days we had:

• ed
• vi
• emacs
• pico

There were others but those were the main contenders. Now we have:

• Eclipse
• Netbeans
• Visual Studio
• TextMate
• E-texteditor
• Sam
• Acme
• Jed
• Joe
• nedit

…. and many more. But we still fail to be satisfied, I admit I’m guilty of this. I’ve tried a lot of those editors. I used ed for 6 years and then switched to vi used it for 2 or more years. Then emacs which is still going strong. What I like about emacs, is elisp. I’m not a fan of all the key combos (chords), but, I am a big fan of it’s navigation shortcuts, which are basically the same used in most shell these days as a default.

As I have moved to OS X (yet again) I’ve being trying out TextMate. One of the things I really like about it is the emacs navigation bindings (Ctrl-a - Beginning of line) (Ctrl-e - End of line) etc… and the fact you can do everything with the keyboard. I’m not a fan of the mouse, which why Quicksilver is the first application I installed on my mac.

Although what is really fascinating, is to observe all the editors mentioned in my limited list above –let’s face it there are a lot editors right now (free and commercial). Looking at the differences of approaches, as well as the similarities they share, taking into account what they state as their prime value, and what the users of those editors and IDE value, it just boggles the mind. We are still searching and not satisfied with the current state of our programming tool set. I know there are people that are very much happy with their tools, but those in my humble opinion, are the minority. Even they, try out new editors/IDEs. Sometimes we have to use tools we hate because they are the standard at our workplace and everybody has to use the same hammer no matter what. In a way it makes perfect sense, different editors handle things a bit different, and well the (tab vs. spaces) is one of those, as well, as many other aspects.

If you compare editors to compilers, you will see that there are a handful of compilers (C and C++) that are consistently used by most programmers. If you go to Java you have the same thing, but with editors every day a new, better, robust, user friendly, does what you need editor comes along.

I don’t think it’s all bad, I think the reasons for this phenomena has more to do with human nature, and less with technical details. We are strange beings. We use things despite the fact that they hurt us because we have grown accustomed to them. Alternatives, despite being superior or providing better benefits scare us. We use things that make us inefficient, because we believe its a waste of our time to learn a better way of doing things.

We have different editors/IDEs, much in the same way we have different types of pens. With the caveat that a pen is a pen is a pen, and they are all used in the same way (fountain pen being the exception), but not all editors work the same way. Each editor has some form of a learning curve, and the reason we become so fanatical. It becomes an extension of our self. When we are programming, or writing, having to stop our train of thought to look into a manual to find the combinations of key, or the command to do “X” is really frustrating, so we learn that one editor (some will search, for the editor that has the least learning curve) others look for power, and so on, but most often than not, we start with the wrong editor/IDE for our needs.

I’m not advocating the use of any particular tool, I believe that every single person should make their own choice. What I do find interesting, is how people are so resistant to change his tool, even when it’s in his best interest. I don’t want to get into the psychology of it (though I have to some point), but we do need to step back, and unplug ourselves from the Matrix before it consumes us, and be objective to our needs. In the end it’s our well being and happiness that really matters.