Not an Emacs guys, Rands? Then Vi is for you. Using that logic, you’re going to point me at Emacs to which I’m going to respond, “I want a new text editor religion, not a new religion, a new language, and a new operating system”. A requirement for a editor may come from my Wordstar days… it’s gotta be a chore to learn how to use. I can tweak the keystrokes to my heart’s content, but I’m still waiting for my BBEdit holy shit moment that demonstrates it’s greatness. It’s aggregated common meta-commands as tools right on the main menu. I’m still a manager and maybe that’s my problem… I don’t have a real word use case for an editor. I’m writing this article in BBEdit right this moment and I’m here to ask you, “What’s the big deal?” Heresy. Folks ask, “Do they have BBEdit for the PC?” They ask knowing nothing about the actual application, they ask because the reverence for BBEdit sounds like religion and that means it must be important. The buzz about BBEdit is actually is loud enough to hear about in Windows land. They say the first application developed for Mac OS X was BBEdit. Amongst the promise of Unix was the promise of a new religion. The words.įast forward to my conversion to the Mac. For writing I was using Word, getting lost in font selection, page spacing, and other irrelevant formatting tasks that took me away from what mattered. I kept Codewright around for grins, but I was never really using it. I was now tweaking email sorting rules rather than highlighting syntax. White = Windows / Mac.Īfter Netscape, the shit hit the fan. Further proof that all you need to see to understand the origin story of a programmer is what colored background they use in their editor: Black = Unix or DOS. Black background with stunningly annoying syntax highlighting. I still have my cwright.ini preferences sitting around somewhere that made Codewright look EXACTLY like my favorite DOS-based editor. When I left Borland for Netscape, I kept Brief nearby mainly because another tool, Coderwright, provided a Windows-based programmer’s editor as well Brief keyboard emulation. Unlike WordStar, I don’t remember much of these keystrokes although I suspect Ctrl-Arrow is a holdover from those days. Like WordPerfect, Brief went out of it’s way to get the hell out of your way which, given real estate situation with text based non-GUI editors, was a plus. Like WordPerfect, Brief used an obscure set of keystrokes to get the done. The words.Īt the time, I was working at Borland and the engineering community used Brief. Well, you can, but your code looks horrible because graphical user interfaces do a splendid job of forcing look and feel down your throat, but as a programmer all you care about is the precision of the content. Wordstar was dead and graphical user interfaces were the shit, so I spent a brief time courting relevant versions of Microsoft Word within Windows 95, but I quickly learned this wasn’t going to work in my industry. You would never believe me how many people on this planet are still using DOS-based versions of WordPerfect right this very second… so I’m not going to tell you… you probably know one.īut I am a geek and geeks evolve because if they don’t they become a joke. that I’d be running Wordstar in a Virtual PC window on my Mac right now. It’s entirely possible if I wasn’t afflicted with N.A.D.D. I did most of early college work inside a DOS window running Wordstar even as Wordperfect, Lotus Ami Pro, and early versions of Microsoft Word were kicking the shit out of Wordstar. When forced to abandon my Apple ][ for a PC, Wordstar was there and continued to be there as early versions of Windows arrived. Who cared none of my other apps ran in CP/M… I knew Wordstar… and still do today. I would literally reboot my Apple ] [ (equipped with my swank CP/M hardware card) in order to get to my word processor. This was an editor which ran many years ago on CP/M. My first conversion to (hold your breath) Wordstar. Might as well compare and contrast reasons to breathe. Arguing with you about moving to a different editor is pointless. You are the wizard of Emacs or the king of bbedit. In time, you grow comfortable with it, like your favorite type of pen, and that’s it… you’re done. You start ignorant… wondering what all the fuss is about and then you either discover or are forced into a particular editor.
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