>* syntax holdups: you miss an underscore and your document is broken. All the way through. And can take an hour to fix even if you're skilled. I'm sorry, but

>* syntax holdups: you miss an underscore and your document is broken. All the way through. And can take an hour to fix even if you're skilled. I'm sorry, but I just have no idea what you're talking about. I haven't encountered anything like that - not when I was starting out with LaTeX, not now when I use it for writing technical docs. "An hour to fix" smells like pure FUD to me - any mistake can take an hour, a minute, or even a week to fix. However, I can't imagine a syntax error like missing an underscore - especially one like that - could take more than a few minutes at the very most. >PS: NeoVim sounds like someone finally got off their high horse (or from whining) and decided to actually make something better. Thanks! I think you're a bit confused as to what exactly are the "hardcore entitled hackers" defending. Lots of systems in the UNIX ecosystem are bogged down by backward compatibility, are arcane, or just plainly in need of rewrite. Nobody disputes that. The commenters here however attack them from a completely different position, and with arguments which mostly don't hold water - so don't expect no defense. Hackers aren't the kind of people who would cling to their tools despite them having obvious and easily mitigable flaws. After all, this post did gain a lot of traction, at this point mostly by simply presenting what would be great to do.