5 ms·

Things a text editor must do

45 points by davweb 14y ago

jussij 14y ago
> It turns out that my brain was only fitted with 72 bytes of "finger memory"; furthermore it turns out to be EPROM, not Flash. I need to wipe out all the WordStar keystrokes from 1986 (Ctrl+Y to delete a line, anyone?) before I can add any more, and I have lost the ultra-violet wiping-out gadget (ask your dad) needed to achieve this. If he'd taken a look at the Zeus editor he would have found all the features mention (except the multi-cursor thing) and by selecting the WordStar key mapping, he wouldn't even have to erase the EPROM in his fingers. Jussi Jumppanen Author: Zeus
- lotsofcows 14y ago
  Verity Stob is a laaaadddddy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_Stob http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_Stob
  - jussij 14y ago
    My apologies to Verity for the gender error.
NateDad 14y ago
I like Sublime, but I think it's criminal that it can't show line endings. That's right up there with syntax highlighting in my list of must-have features. How often do line endings screw you? Since I tend to work on a lot of cross platform stuff, for me, it's all the time. I pretty much keep Notepad++ around just so I can pop things into it to look at their line endings.
- thezoid 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can turn that on. Though I think it shows all whitespace characters unless he's changed some more recently.
- zackkitzmiller 14y ago
  This should solve your problem: https://github.com/SublimeText/LineEndings https://github.com/SublimeText/LineEndings
Jgrubb 14y ago
I'm often taken a bit back by how bad text looks in screenshots of Windows whatever. I really wouldn't want to look at that all day. Just my preference...
- swah 14y ago
  It's ok - we feel the same about OSX font rendering.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
mattfieldy 14y ago
For an article that prefaces it's dialogue with a desire to "leave the right-thinking reader with an impression of calm, reasoned rationality", it reads like opinionated tosh. How the author arrived at these six criteria as a reasonable litmus test for the applicability and usefulness of a text editor absolutely boggles the mind.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  Verity is usually satirical; at best he's overblown and ridiculous. I don't think the Reg's editorial staff expects you to take this as gospel, it's mostly for entertainment value.
- amboar 14y ago
  Probably by starting with the idea of writing an article gushing about sublime and working backwards in an attempt to not appear biased :p
- derefr 14y ago
  > right-thinking reader This should have been your cue; "right-thinking" as a term is right up there with "modest proposal."
kaoD 14y ago
The article could've been titled "I hate emacs for no particular reason". It's probable more accurate.
martinced 14y ago
What an opinionated piece of crap TFA is. This kind of stuff is precisely why I stopped reading The Reg a long time ago. Seriously: "4. The editor should contain no implementation of Lisp." Why do they do that? Because of course Emacs totally rocks in their last example, where you need to apply the same modification to various lines (in Emacs you'd probably use a macro repeating some search and replace using a quick Lisp substitution). How do you even want to talk with people who argue for their own limitation? Appeal to authority: I urge people to read "Beating the average" from pg.
- Avshalom 14y ago
  That's fine because emacs has been an implementation of lisp that contains an editor for years now.
- fein 14y ago
  Elisp is why I love emacs so much, especially given that I get that all that power in a console. Editor wars are editor wars I guess. People just need an excuse to write about something it seems. I think the only prereq for a good editor is that it should be free, and nothing more. Everything else is a matter of preference.
- lotsofcows 14y ago
  It's a joke! How is it possible, given the URL, that it's the Reg, the author's name, the layout and the content to miss that it's a joke? This particular line is a reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule
- RickHull 14y ago
  In this house, we obey Poe's law!
- redacted 14y ago
  -------> the joke 0 /|\ you / \
- marcosdumay 14y ago
Ensorceled 14y ago
Well. At least he was pretty clear this was all his opinion. But that's a couple of minutes of my life I'd like to get back. I'm soOOooo glad I learned ed as my first editor which lead to a 30 year love affair with vi. Both of those editors sound painful to use.
- swah 14y ago
  OTOH Vimscript is painful to use compared to Python...
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    That's a feature, instead of customizing your text editor you spend your time coding the thing you originally wanted to code.
    - swah 14y ago
      Heh, that's true. But most Vim users also want customization, as shown by bundles like http://vim.spf13.com/ http://vim.spf13.com/.
  - johncoltrane 14y ago
    For a pythonista, maybe.
  - Ensorceled 14y ago
    True. But it's something I really only have to do when switching languages and frameworks.
bcoates 14y ago
Before you all get too angry about the scandalous lies about your favorite editor note that this is a Verity Stob column. If you're reading it for a sober, fair-minded review of the various tradeoffs involved in the very serious business of text editing, you're doing it wrong.
- benparsons 14y ago
  All I've taken from this page of comments is that HN users have no sense of humour. Any attack on Vim or Emacs is blasphemy and must be resisted!! No, calm down.
- michael_h 14y ago
  I'm not sure how someone can read past ...press Ctrl + Shift + L (if you are following along on your Mac, just press squiggle squoggle shift Home) and not pick up that this is satire, or perhaps just plain humo(u)r.
  - yen223 14y ago
    It's so obviously satire - I mean, which Mac has a Home button amirite?
    - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
      My Apple keyboard has a 'Home' key... http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/HT1216/Pasted%20Graphic.png http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/... (And of course, all iOS devices have a 'Home' button.)
- epo 14y ago
  It's (meant to be) a humour column as any attempt to read TFA would reveal. Anyone taking it seriously, or worse taking offence, is either illiterate or an idiot.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
malux85 14y ago
"No support for Object Pascal ... minus 1 million points" "How can I possibly use this as an IDE for theregister.co.uk backend systems when it doesn't support object pascal" Get off my lawn! What smells like Mustard? The president is a demi-crat!
oneeyedpigeon 14y ago
Sublime is generally great, but it desperately needs one fix before I'll ever really love it: make page up/down commutative.
binarymax 14y ago
I will say TexPad is an amazing editor (as long as you don't need to do any unicode). Like verity I've been using it for many many years, and I have yet to find a replacement that I enjoy as much. When I switched to Linux, I tried to learn all kinds of emacs and vi, and never enjoyed them as much. LightTable seems like it will finally answer my prayers, however.
jtheory 14y ago
I must say this isn't nearly as funny as much of the Verity Stob posts, but no problem. Mostly I was amazed to see that the same horrible bug in Notepad++ that seriously bit me once (the text replacement buffer silently truncated... aargh!) is the one mentioned here.
- JonnieCache 14y ago
  It's hard to beat her history of computing, "8086 and all that" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/22/verity_stob_8086_and_all_that_revisited/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/22/verity_stob_8086_and...
Samuel_Michon 14y ago
"Another giveaway [of Sublime's Mac influences]: Sublime comes with a set of colour schemes with names like Dawn, Expresso Libre, Monokai, Slush & Poppies and the Smell of Napalm in the Morning (I may have made one of those up). Contrast this with an equivalent list from a Windows product (in fact Delphi VCL skins): Carbon, Charcoal Dark Slate, Emerald Light Slate, Golden Graphite, Slate Classico and Dark Beige Slate Classico Carbon (I may have made one of those up)." To me, the second list comes off as more Mac themed. Carbon is a set of Mac APIs, Charcoal was the system font for Mac OS 8, and Graphite was the nickname of the Power Mac G4. As for the first list, OS X has a desktop picture of poppies and Expresso[sic] could be Java inspired (like Cocoa, Gianduia, Espresso, Chocolat, Cappuccino, etc.) I doubt Apple would call anything 'Libre' in their English branding or documentation.
jhawk28 14y ago
Sublime Text 3 fixes most of the problems mentioned in the article. It starts up fast, handles large files better. Still no option to show newline characters.

45 points by davweb 14y ago

> It turns out that my brain was only fitted with 72 bytes of "finger memory"; furthermore it turns out to be EPROM, not Flash. I need to wipe out all the WordStar keystrokes from 1986 (Ctrl+Y to delete a line, anyone?) before I can add any more, and I have lost the ultra-violet wiping-out gadget (ask your dad) needed to achieve this. If he'd taken a look at the Zeus editor he would have found all the features mention (except the multi-cursor thing) and by selecting the WordStar key mapping, he wouldn't even have to erase the EPROM in his fingers. Jussi Jumppanen Author: Zeus

lotsofcows 14y ago
Verity Stob is a laaaadddddy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_Stob http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_Stob
- jussij 14y ago
  My apologies to Verity for the gender error.

NateDad 14y ago

I like Sublime, but I think it's criminal that it can't show line endings. That's right up there with syntax highlighting in my list of must-have features. How often do line endings screw you? Since I tend to work on a lot of cross platform stuff, for me, it's all the time. I pretty much keep Notepad++ around just so I can pop things into it to look at their line endings.

thezoid 14y ago
I'm pretty sure you can turn that on. Though I think it shows all whitespace characters unless he's changed some more recently.
zackkitzmiller 14y ago
This should solve your problem: https://github.com/SublimeText/LineEndings https://github.com/SublimeText/LineEndings

Jgrubb 14y ago

I'm often taken a bit back by how bad text looks in screenshots of Windows whatever. I really wouldn't want to look at that all day. Just my preference...

swah 14y ago
It's ok - we feel the same about OSX font rendering.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

mattfieldy 14y ago

For an article that prefaces it's dialogue with a desire to "leave the right-thinking reader with an impression of calm, reasoned rationality", it reads like opinionated tosh. How the author arrived at these six criteria as a reasonable litmus test for the applicability and usefulness of a text editor absolutely boggles the mind.

alanctgardner2 14y ago
Verity is usually satirical; at best he's overblown and ridiculous. I don't think the Reg's editorial staff expects you to take this as gospel, it's mostly for entertainment value.
amboar 14y ago
Probably by starting with the idea of writing an article gushing about sublime and working backwards in an attempt to not appear biased :p
derefr 14y ago
> right-thinking reader This should have been your cue; "right-thinking" as a term is right up there with "modest proposal."

kaoD 14y ago

The article could've been titled "I hate emacs for no particular reason". It's probable more accurate.

martinced 14y ago

What an opinionated piece of crap TFA is. This kind of stuff is precisely why I stopped reading The Reg a long time ago. Seriously: "4. The editor should contain no implementation of Lisp." Why do they do that? Because of course Emacs totally rocks in their last example, where you need to apply the same modification to various lines (in Emacs you'd probably use a macro repeating some search and replace using a quick Lisp substitution). How do you even want to talk with people who argue for their own limitation? Appeal to authority: I urge people to read "Beating the average" from pg.

Avshalom 14y ago
That's fine because emacs has been an implementation of lisp that contains an editor for years now.
fein 14y ago
Elisp is why I love emacs so much, especially given that I get that all that power in a console. Editor wars are editor wars I guess. People just need an excuse to write about something it seems. I think the only prereq for a good editor is that it should be free, and nothing more. Everything else is a matter of preference.
lotsofcows 14y ago
It's a joke! How is it possible, given the URL, that it's the Reg, the author's name, the layout and the content to miss that it's a joke? This particular line is a reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule
RickHull 14y ago
In this house, we obey Poe's law!
redacted 14y ago
-------> the joke 0 /|\ you / \
marcosdumay 14y ago

Ensorceled 14y ago

Well. At least he was pretty clear this was all his opinion. But that's a couple of minutes of my life I'd like to get back. I'm soOOooo glad I learned ed as my first editor which lead to a 30 year love affair with vi. Both of those editors sound painful to use.

swah 14y ago
OTOH Vimscript is painful to use compared to Python...
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  That's a feature, instead of customizing your text editor you spend your time coding the thing you originally wanted to code.
  - swah 14y ago
    Heh, that's true. But most Vim users also want customization, as shown by bundles like http://vim.spf13.com/ http://vim.spf13.com/.
- johncoltrane 14y ago
  For a pythonista, maybe.
- Ensorceled 14y ago
  True. But it's something I really only have to do when switching languages and frameworks.

bcoates 14y ago

Before you all get too angry about the scandalous lies about your favorite editor note that this is a Verity Stob column. If you're reading it for a sober, fair-minded review of the various tradeoffs involved in the very serious business of text editing, you're doing it wrong.

benparsons 14y ago
All I've taken from this page of comments is that HN users have no sense of humour. Any attack on Vim or Emacs is blasphemy and must be resisted!! No, calm down.
michael_h 14y ago
I'm not sure how someone can read past ...press Ctrl + Shift + L (if you are following along on your Mac, just press squiggle squoggle shift Home) and not pick up that this is satire, or perhaps just plain humo(u)r.
- yen223 14y ago
  It's so obviously satire - I mean, which Mac has a Home button amirite?
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    My Apple keyboard has a 'Home' key... http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/HT1216/Pasted%20Graphic.png http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/... (And of course, all iOS devices have a 'Home' button.)
epo 14y ago
It's (meant to be) a humour column as any attempt to read TFA would reveal. Anyone taking it seriously, or worse taking offence, is either illiterate or an idiot.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

malux85 14y ago

"No support for Object Pascal ... minus 1 million points" "How can I possibly use this as an IDE for theregister.co.uk backend systems when it doesn't support object pascal" Get off my lawn! What smells like Mustard? The president is a demi-crat!

oneeyedpigeon 14y ago

Sublime is generally great, but it desperately needs one fix before I'll ever really love it: make page up/down commutative.

binarymax 14y ago

I will say TexPad is an amazing editor (as long as you don't need to do any unicode). Like verity I've been using it for many many years, and I have yet to find a replacement that I enjoy as much. When I switched to Linux, I tried to learn all kinds of emacs and vi, and never enjoyed them as much. LightTable seems like it will finally answer my prayers, however.

jtheory 14y ago

I must say this isn't nearly as funny as much of the Verity Stob posts, but no problem. Mostly I was amazed to see that the same horrible bug in Notepad++ that seriously bit me once (the text replacement buffer silently truncated... aargh!) is the one mentioned here.

JonnieCache 14y ago
It's hard to beat her history of computing, "8086 and all that" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/22/verity_stob_8086_and_all_that_revisited/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/22/verity_stob_8086_and...

Samuel_Michon 14y ago

"Another giveaway [of Sublime's Mac influences]: Sublime comes with a set of colour schemes with names like Dawn, Expresso Libre, Monokai, Slush & Poppies and the Smell of Napalm in the Morning (I may have made one of those up). Contrast this with an equivalent list from a Windows product (in fact Delphi VCL skins): Carbon, Charcoal Dark Slate, Emerald Light Slate, Golden Graphite, Slate Classico and Dark Beige Slate Classico Carbon (I may have made one of those up)." To me, the second list comes off as more Mac themed. Carbon is a set of Mac APIs, Charcoal was the system font for Mac OS 8, and Graphite was the nickname of the Power Mac G4. As for the first list, OS X has a desktop picture of poppies and Expresso[sic] could be Java inspired (like Cocoa, Gianduia, Espresso, Chocolat, Cappuccino, etc.) I doubt Apple would call anything 'Libre' in their English branding or documentation.

jhawk28 14y ago

Sublime Text 3 fixes most of the problems mentioned in the article. It starts up fast, handles large files better. Still no option to show newline characters.