The order becomes screwy, the items don’t align properly and etc. On average the document goes through 3-5 people and somewhere in that process the enumerated lists always, always break. This work is done by some office clerk, gets reviewed by his supervisor and then approved by a director. The problem is that it has to be customized for each client – which involves adding and removing items, changing their orders and etc. All in all it is not a hugely complicated document. Some are an entire paragraph, and some have sub-list of 5-10 items, each of which can have 2-3 sub sub items. We have a medium sized document – a request list of sorts, that is about 4-6 pages long, and consist of an enumerated list of about 60-80 items. Let me give you an example from where I work. It works fine for typing out a short letter, or an interoffice memo – but it is incredibly lousy for just about anything else. And they should, because Word is a big, bloated, ugly and unstable disaster of a text editor. Yes, fiction writers are leaving the MS Word universe in droves. People who also work with plain text files all day, but became disillusioned and frustrated by WYSIWYG tools like Word: creative writers. In recent years however, there has appeared a new group of people interested in good text editing experience. You can of course use them for other things, but coding is what they excel at. Vim and Emacs are specifically designed for coding. Hence, most advanced text editors are primarily targeted at programmers.
#WRITE LINES OF YOUR FAVORITE TEXT EDITOR CODE#
That’s how we get things done, and using sub-par tool does impact our productivity, efficiency and ability to deliver code in a timely manner.
But it kinda makes sense because a text editor is our primary work tool. We often bicker about them, and judge people based on their editor preferences. Programmers on the other hand are very peculiar about their editor choice. The funny thing about text editors is that most people never actually think about them, and don’t realize that there are choices beyond Word, Notepad and/or TextEdit. And I can’t say a bad word about Emacs – it’s a damn fine editor in it’s own right. The only other editor that gives you a remotely similar kind of experience is Emacs. It’s that kind of an editor – it works the same regardless environment, and connection speed. The Register published a fragment of interview with Billy Joy recently in which he explained how he wrote vi to be usable over 300 baud modem.
#WRITE LINES OF YOUR FAVORITE TEXT EDITOR MAC#
Whether I’m working on Windows, on Mac or on a headless server, via SSH session, the user experience is exactly the same. And you know what? Vim is the same everywhere. In addition to that I also (as of lately) maintain a FreeBSD server. I more or less share my computing time equally between three operating system: Windows, Ubuntu and OSX. But among other things, it’s a perfect editor for an operating system nomad like me. There are many reasons to love Vi and Vim – the speed, the flexibility, the power. But I can’t say I wasn’t pleased with these results. I’m not sure if it was because I skewed the results by stating my preference for that editor above the poll, or because it’s just that popular. When I polled my readers with the same question back in 2009, Vi won by a landslide.
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