I find that many people "banging the drum hard" for a text editor are falling for the same kind of faulty thinking.
In my experience, the only situations a colleague has been slowed down in a significant way by their choice of editor seem to boil down to two categories:
- Haven't put in the time to actually learn the tool (i.e. using vim purely in insert mode, or VSCode as a plain text editor, constantly going back to a file manager to find and open files) and get stuck in a particularly horrible workflow.
- Burn hours daily fiddling with their setup, chasing perfection.
Neither of these are typically caused by the tool itself. At the end of the day... I'm confident most devs can be quite effective using just DOS EDIT or Notepad if pressed.
As for me.... unless I'm doing something specialized, I catch myself trying to eke out that last 1% productivity boost from my editor and ask myself... is this really the best thing to be messing with? Usually, it's not. Honestly, writing documentation or doing a quick prototype is much higher return.
In my experience, the only situations a colleague has been slowed down in a significant way by their choice of editor seem to boil down to two categories: - Haven't put in the time to actually learn the tool (i.e. using vim purely in insert mode, or VSCode as a plain text editor, constantly going back to a file manager to find and open files) and get stuck in a particularly horrible workflow. - Burn hours daily fiddling with their setup, chasing perfection.
Neither of these are typically caused by the tool itself. At the end of the day... I'm confident most devs can be quite effective using just DOS EDIT or Notepad if pressed.
As for me.... unless I'm doing something specialized, I catch myself trying to eke out that last 1% productivity boost from my editor and ask myself... is this really the best thing to be messing with? Usually, it's not. Honestly, writing documentation or doing a quick prototype is much higher return.