Tirade of the Tools

I am a deeply sick individual who conflates customizing a text editor over the course of a week so that it is a passable version of a program like Notepad---something that every computer has had out of the box for thirty or forty years---with creating whatever it is that I am ostensibly actually working on. At least I am not alone in this sickness, nor is the art of writing the only one to have practitioners afflicted with this disease. Just ask the person with the $2,000 contractor grade drill who sucks those loose fence boards in impossibly tight, or the forty year old weekend warrior whose carbon-fiber road bike could moonlight on the Tour-de-France, or the aspiring novelist with the cabinet full of fountain pens and inks, about their purchases. Sometimes the fetishization of the tool is the hobby itself, and who am I to judge. If the very notion of configuring an editor to be usable for writing prose causes circuits in your brain to start popping, take heed of the acrid smoke:…