Sal’s

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 a fight in a group of software engineers is to express a preference for one of the two old war horses vi and emacs. Both are horrendously unusable, yet the loyalty remains and the battles rage on.[2]

I’m not a WYSIWYG guy, but still, too true. 😆

It was discovered that emacs is superior in most respects to vi for novice users who have not learned either editor yet. Although emacs is easier to learn and more powerful than vi, vi can be used by experienced users to produce the same results for editing text as emacs.

For experienced users in one of the two editors, changing editors will not provide any advantages for the user, and will only consume time.[3] [emphasis added]

Amen to that. I’d make just one edit for modern times: For experienced users in one of the two editors any capable editor…

Bruce, thanks again for your efforts, your blog, and reaching out!

  1. Poller, M.F., Garter, S.K. (1983). A Comparative Study of Moded and Modeless Text Editing by Experienced Editor Users. Proceedings of CHI Conference, pp. 166–170. ↩︎

  2. Sellers, Michael (July 1994). Designing for Demanding Users. interactions, Vol. 1, No 3. ↩︎

  3. Hurwitz, Cherie. A Theoretical and Experimental Comparison of vi and Emacs. ↩︎

#text-editors #emacs #vim