Before you all get too angry about the scandalous lies about your favorite editor note that this is a Verity Stob column. If you're reading it for a sober, fair-minded review of the various tradeoffs involved in the very serious business of text editing, you're doing it wrong.
It's (meant to be) a humour column as any attempt to read TFA would reveal. Anyone taking it seriously, or worse taking offence, is either illiterate or an idiot.
> It turns out that my brain was only fitted with 72 bytes of "finger
memory"; furthermore it turns out to be EPROM, not Flash. I need to wipe
out all the WordStar keystrokes from 1986 (Ctrl+Y to delete a line,
anyone?) before I can add any more, and I have lost the ultra-violet
wiping-out gadget (ask your dad) needed to achieve this.
If he'd taken a look at the Zeus editor he would have found all the features mention (except the multi-cursor thing) and by selecting the WordStar key mapping, he wouldn't even have to erase the EPROM in his fingers.
I must say this isn't nearly as funny as much of the Verity Stob posts, but no problem.
Mostly I was amazed to see that the same horrible bug in Notepad++ that seriously bit me once (the text replacement buffer silently truncated... aargh!) is the one mentioned here.
I'm often taken a bit back by how bad text looks in screenshots of Windows whatever. I really wouldn't want to look at that all day. Just my preference...
I like Sublime, but I think it's criminal that it can't show line endings. That's right up there with syntax highlighting in my list of must-have features. How often do line endings screw you? Since I tend to work on a lot of cross platform stuff, for me, it's all the time. I pretty much keep Notepad++ around just so I can pop things into it to look at their line endings.
"Another giveaway [of Sublime's Mac influences]: Sublime comes with a set of colour schemes with names like Dawn, Expresso Libre, Monokai, Slush & Poppies and the Smell of Napalm in the Morning (I may have made one of those up).
Contrast this with an equivalent list from a Windows product (in fact Delphi VCL skins): Carbon, Charcoal Dark Slate, Emerald Light Slate, Golden Graphite, Slate Classico and Dark Beige Slate Classico Carbon (I may have made one of those up)."
To me, the second list comes off as more Mac themed. Carbon is a set of Mac APIs, Charcoal was the system font for Mac OS 8, and Graphite was the nickname of the Power Mac G4.
As for the first list, OS X has a desktop picture of poppies and Expresso[sic] could be Java inspired (like Cocoa, Gianduia, Espresso, Chocolat, Cappuccino, etc.) I doubt Apple would call anything 'Libre' in their English branding or documentation.
I will say TexPad is an amazing editor (as long as you don't need to do any unicode). Like verity I've been using it for many many years, and I have yet to find a replacement that I enjoy as much.
When I switched to Linux, I tried to learn all kinds of emacs and vi, and never enjoyed them as much. LightTable seems like it will finally answer my prayers, however.
For an article that prefaces it's dialogue with a desire to "leave the right-thinking reader with an impression of calm, reasoned rationality", it reads like opinionated tosh. How the author arrived at these six criteria as a reasonable litmus test for the applicability and usefulness of a text editor absolutely boggles the mind.
Verity is usually satirical; at best he's overblown and ridiculous. I don't think the Reg's editorial staff expects you to take this as gospel, it's mostly for entertainment value.
Sublime Text 3 fixes most of the problems mentioned in the article. It starts up fast, handles large files better. Still no option to show newline characters.
What an opinionated piece of crap TFA is. This kind of stuff is precisely why I stopped reading The Reg a long time ago.
Seriously:
"4. The editor should contain no implementation of Lisp."
Why do they do that? Because of course Emacs totally rocks in their last example, where you need to apply the same modification to various lines (in Emacs you'd probably use a macro repeating some search and replace using a quick Lisp substitution).
How do you even want to talk with people who argue for their own limitation?
Appeal to authority: I urge people to read "Beating the average" from pg.
Elisp is why I love emacs so much, especially given that I get that all that power in a console.
Editor wars are editor wars I guess. People just need an excuse to write about something it seems. I think the only prereq for a good editor is that it should be free, and nothing more. Everything else is a matter of preference.
