Bill Bumgarner on Text Editor Wars

Brilliant and succinct:

As a result, any user who spends any significant amount of time with any one text editor — I’m talking years, here — will build up a set of usage patterns that employed rapidly and repeatedly throughout an editing session. Often this is called “muscle memory”, but it is really more that your brain builds up a library of “mental macros” that are applied almost subconsciously as you work with the editor.

Because of this, switching text editors is incredibly disruptive to one’s workflow and results in some awesome “religious wars”. Why? Because it is just too damned difficult to actually quantify why one editor is so much better than another.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to say this for months. Perfect.

★ Friday, 10 November 2006