Comment by pmkary
4 hours ago
Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.
The implementation is usually pretty ugly, actually
Yes, but...
On one otherwise tranquil morning Master Foo's meditations were disturbed by cries of distress.
Finding that they came from one of the novices, he inquired "What is the difficulty here?"
The novice replied, "I am frustrated by my tools. Every day I must use many different editors because neither Emacs nor vi nor any of these other random editors has all the features I require."
Master Foo nodded. "How," he asked, "would a master of the Great Way resolve this difficulty?"
The student thought for a few moments, then replied. "Well, it's obvious. I will write the best editor ever. It will do everything I need. It will do everything everyone needs. And the world will be a better place because..."
The novice's speech halted as Master Foo rapped him sharply across the back of the head with his staff.
"Um. Master?" the student asked, rubbing the back of his head gingerly. "In what way have I erred?"
"Fool!" said Master Foo. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?"
Upon hearing this, the novice attained enlightenment.
—from The Rootless Root (https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/index.html)
Yes, but ...
Sometimes there are genuine reasons to build a text editor. It's really hard to build a full WYSIWYG graphics editor without modelling text layout yourself, especially for more advanced work like properly curving the text.
Just what part of this comment deserved to get a -1 point leaves a whole universe of imagination to me and no answer :/
Literally I only praised and wrote how much I love something and how beautiful text editors are. And there are people who cannot stand this :))) oh wow!
Seriously. What is so beautiful about text editors? (I am not the downvoter btw).
On text editor related topics, you should have thrown down the gauntlet and been explicitly clear that emacs rules, vi sucks, spaces are supreme, tabs are terrible, and mixing them is miscegenation. That way you only offend evil people, so their downvotes are delightful. Revel in them instead of whining!
Since you enjoy beautiful machinery, here are some classic clockworks:
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/news-tape/utilities...
Sometimes people down vote for no reason. Unfortunately, when one complains about it, they look like a whiner.
That's because they are whining about worthless internet points.
A word of unsolicited advice: HNers are a prickly lot and will downvote without explanation because you stepped on some unknowable pet peeve of theirs that probably nobody else in the world shares. This happens all the time but you likely only notice when you happen to get downvoted before any upvotes and end up at 0 or -1. If your comment is reasonable, it will usually come back up.
But complaining about downvotes will certainly earn more of them.
Don’t forget the old “downvote the other comments so mine goes to the top “ trick.
All your best stuff will get downvoted by at least somebody eventually. For some reason, that somebody always gets in early enough that you notice.
I don't think that's certain at all. What affects votes is:
1. Being near the top of the page
2. Having a downvote already
You can curtail the bandwagon effect by complaining.
It's unfortunately all too easy to hit the downvote arrow when you're aiming for the other one, especially for people using touchscreens.
I don't know who thought it was a good idea to put those character-size icons on adjacent lines, or who thinks it's a good idea to leave them there, but... this is one of those cases where it's better to assume it's an accident rather than an attack.
It's also true that there are a lot of asshats^H^H^H^H^H^H^H empty boats around here, but the above advice still applies, I think.
i didn't downvote it but I thought it was pretty empty. "how do i love thee, let me count the ways" has been done before, and his love was more interesting than that you like text editors generically, and you don't mention anything you like. I'm not in favor of more poesy in tech circles.
i like text editors but I feel they contain "everything but the kitchen sink" (if you know you know) and that makes them somewhat impenetrable and difficult to modify and bend to new purposes even though they contain so much capability and potential, and the people who do understand them think it's a good idea to drag and drop an URL and have that do a web transaction and download a buttload of text, when what I wanted was just the text... of the url. I'm sure there's some way to turn it off, but instead there should be some way to turn it on. Oh yeah, worse when it's a jpg url, guess what they do with that.
in another direction, the point of markdown was to be editable and readable in source form, not to be a replacement for rendered HTML, but the same people who ruined HTML by overloading it are now fully engaged in ruining markdown by overloading it and making it unreadable in source form.