I have used lot of editors over the years. For the last 5 years I have been using VSCode. It has been a great editor. It initially was quite slow but has improved over the years. And the ecosystem itself has a lot of plugins. Potentially making it close to a general purpose IDE. Which is pretty great if you are looking for a single editor that can pretty much work with everything and has support for new thing that comes up out of the box without any configuration without using a full fledged IDE
Using minimal tools
Over the years I have started to believe that having a minimal set of handpicked tools that you know well so that it doesn't get in your way is better than having a batman utility belt that can do everything by default. Minimal tools doesn't mean using notepad out on a touch screen without keyboard 😅. But more like using a focused tool that is sophisticated enough to do what you want easily and should be extendable in the future if you need it to be
Choosing the editor
While VSCode is awesome it has been slowly turning into an IDE and has a lot of things by default that I don't need. I wouldn't be surprised if 5 years down the lane they try to replace Visual studio with VSCode. Also I would I have been thinking about switching to something simpler that can serve me well for the next decade. Here is list of things I think I need in a text editor
- It should be fast
- It should be very minimal just enough to serve my editing needs
- It should be extendible in-case I need to do something more in the future
- It should work everywhere
- It should be able to survive the test of time and not be abandoned in the next few years
I initially thought of Sublime Text. Which is a great editor. But it is frozen in time, it does get updates now and then. While it is extendible to some extent but not everything is up for change.
Then I thought of VIM which is something that I tried briefly in the past for sometime
- It was blazingly fast
- It was minimal by default but can be extended to do anything
- It definitely works everywhere
- It has been around for a long time and will be around for a long time
But Vimscript was awful. I really wished it used a general purpose programming language for writing plugins instead of some arcane scripting language. But a lot has changed since then now we have Neovim which has all the goodness of Vim but with a modern plugin system that uses Lua. A general purpose programming language that is easy to learn and use. Once you get the hang of it VIM motions are awesome. You can take them to any editor. There is even a browser extension that lets you use VIM motions to navigate the web.
I have been using Neovim for the last few weeks with minimal setup and I am loving it. Let's see how it goes.
Originally posted in https://approxhuman.substack.com/
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