Maybe, within the Unix world, but there's a large software world beyond Unix, and that world seems to be grabbing onto 'simple is best' rather hard for my likin

Maybe, within the Unix world, but there's a large software world beyond Unix, and that world seems to be grabbing onto 'simple is best' rather hard for my liking at present. I'm pleased for you that you like the Vi family of editors - I'm relatively familiar with them, but can't stand them. I'll never understand its continuing popularity; I know other editors I'd judge as powerful in practical usage but which are no harder for an ordinary user than Notepad. When I want a straight text editor I use one, but there's more to developing code than just editing text and that's why I like Visual Studio (not that it's the best IDE necessarily, just the one I use for work) - it gives me a single, coherent, consistent interface for developing the program in a way that I find vastly more productive than when I was having to use plain text editors and jump between tools to accomplish routine tasks. I don't for one minute miss having to compile code to find I'd made a one-character typo that didn't compile, or had made a type referencing error. Nor do I miss having a separate window to jump to whenever I realised I needed to check out an individual file while on a bug hunt. I don't dispute IDEs have their training wheels and some of them get in the way, but plain editors have their obstructive limitations too. I use IDEs willingly having come from the other approach, not in ignorance of it. To get back to my original point - we shouldn't be looking to make our tools simple but to make them ruthlessly focused on improving the user experience for our users. Talking paperclips are a bad idea but I don't believe that source control integration in an environment that will largely be used with source control is anything but a boon to developers or that other similar examples in other software are bad. We should be looking to make software as powerful as we can keep under control, not as simple / narrowly focused (I'm aware they're not the same but I don't believe the article would cite Vim as an example of simplicity) as we can manage. Workflow is good, context switch is bad.