> They only look the same to the extent that most of the screen is taken up by, of all things, text. And the main thing I notice about most of the examples giv

> They only look the same to the extent that most of the screen is taken up by, of all things, text. And the main thing I notice about most of the examples given in the article is that they involve most of the screen not containing text. In fact, most of the screen appears to contain nothing useful. There's a reason why the major popular editors all fill the screen with text, and it's something I've discovered from years of editing code: nothing is more important to programmer productivity than being able to pack a lot of code on the screen at once. There is probably an upper bound to this, but I suspect it is higher than available space on my desk to put monitors in. You don't really need annotations and graphics and dotted lines to show you how things relate. You just need to have all the things in front of you so that you can read them together. Since we tend to write code vertically, this is usually best achieved with a small number of side-by-side panes of text, a feature which basically every decent editor has.