I'll nominate another text editor for this subject: Sam. It's a graphical text editor, but it doesn't resemble any other graphical editor I've ever seen. I've b

I'll nominate another text editor for this subject: Sam. It's a graphical text editor, but it doesn't resemble any other graphical editor I've ever seen. I've been told it's "like ed on steroids" but I can't verify that statement as I've never used ed. Sam made me reconsider the way I think about the mouse. In Sam, the mouse is integral to your workflow, but the way you use the mouse is unlike any other editor I've ever used. Brief strokes blended with keyboard stuff. Sam translates remarkably well to the trackpoint, even though it was designed a decade before laptops existed. Its command language is somehow as simple as sed, but (almost) as powerful as vim. It's really old software now, so it lacked some features I wanted (auto-indent, mainly). The source code is simple enough that I just added auto-indent myself! I used Sam for the last two years of my undergrad. I wrote Python, C++, Nim, and Verilog using Sam. Sam shaped the way I think about computers in so many ways. At a glance it would seem idiosyncratic and weird. Having used it, I consider it to be wonderfully ergonomic and creative.