

Things a text editor must do - davweb
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/11/verity_stob_text_editor/

======
bcoates
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.

~~~
michael_h
I'm not sure how someone can read past

    
    
       ...press Ctrl + Shift + L (if you are following along on your Mac, just press squiggle squoggle shift Home)
    

and not pick up that this is _satire_ , or perhaps just plain humo(u)r.

~~~
yen223
It's so obviously satire - I mean, which Mac has a Home button amirite?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
My Apple keyboard has a 'Home' key...

[http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/...](http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/HT1216/Pasted%20Graphic.png)

(And of course, all iOS devices have a 'Home' button.)

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kaoD
The article could've been titled "I hate emacs for no particular reason". It's
probable more accurate.

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jussij
> 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.

Jussi Jumppanen

Author: Zeus

~~~
lotsofcows
Verity Stob is a laaaadddddy.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_Stob>

~~~
jussij
My apologies to Verity for the gender error.

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jtheory
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.

~~~
JonnieCache
It's hard to beat her history of computing, "8086 and all that"

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/22/verity_stob_8086_and...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/22/verity_stob_8086_and_all_that_revisited/)

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Jgrubb
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...

~~~
swah
It's ok - we feel the same about OSX font rendering.

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NateDad
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.

~~~
thezoid
I'm pretty sure you can turn that on. Though I think it shows all whitespace
characters unless he's changed some more recently.

------
Samuel_Michon
_"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.

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Ensorceled
Well. At least he was pretty clear this was all his opinion.

But that's a couple of minutes of my life I'd like to get back.

I'm soOOooo glad I learned ed as my first editor which lead to a 30 year love
affair with vi. Both of those editors sound painful to use.

~~~
swah
OTOH Vimscript is painful to use compared to Python...

~~~
MatthewPhillips
That's a feature, instead of customizing your text editor you spend your time
coding the thing you originally wanted to code.

~~~
swah
Heh, that's true. But most Vim users also want customization, as shown by
bundles like <http://vim.spf13.com/>.

------
malux85
"No support for Object Pascal ... minus 1 million points"

"How can I possibly use this as an IDE for theregister.co.uk backend systems
when it doesn't support _object pascal_ "

Get off my lawn! What smells like Mustard? The president is a demi-crat!

------
binarymax
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.

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mattfieldy
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.

~~~
alanctgardner2
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.

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jhawk28
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.

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oneeyedpigeon
Sublime is generally great, but it desperately needs one fix before I'll ever
really love it: make page up/down commutative.

------
martinced
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.

~~~
lotsofcows
It's a joke!

How is it possible, given the URL, that it's the Reg, the author's name, the
layout and the content to miss that it's a joke?

This particular line is a reference to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule>

