A Perfect Editor

I promised myself that I’d promise you all that I’d stop writing about text editors. At least for a day or two. But I just had a delightful email exchange with Bruce Ediger about my last post, and now I can’t resist writing one more! In addition to offering a generally great and active blog, Bruce has done the admirable work of aggregating actual research on this perplexing topic in his post, There is A Perfect Editor (title is tongue-in-cheek). Here are a couple excerpts I appreciated. Experienced emacs and vi users, who use their editors to write and edit English text, performed a series of basic editing tasks and wrote a movie or book review. Our findings suggest that moded editing, as exemplified by the vi editor, may be preferable for fixed editing tasks, while modeless editing, as exemplified by the emacs editor, may have some advantages for free composing.[1] That reflects my experience. Despite the advent of WYSIWYG editors and graphical symbolic debuggers, an easy way to pick…