"The Idea" here I think is in the revelation of the ultimate preeminence of text in a programmer's life. Plain text deserves our utmost attention, yet many programmers overlook its significance and rarely give it deliberate thought.
"Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else."¹
Vim-navigation provides a mental and spatial "language" that enables efficient text manipulation through keyboard input. Rather than forcing your brain to process raw character chunks on the screen, it allows you to reason about text in meaningful units: letters, words, paragraphs, tags, nested structures - e.g., "delete everything between parentheses" - and more.
Sadly, we keep moving away from plain text conventions, making our work increasingly complicated. Have you ever tried quickly extracting text interwoven with code from Slack into your editor? Ever gotten mad when websites won't let you copy the content or use colors and fonts that make it unreadable?
I implore every programmer to reject the status quo and reclaim agency over text interactions - always find ways to deal with text on your own terms. For instance, I'm reading this thread and typing this very comment in my editor. Why wouldn't I? It has all the tools I need for it - vim-navigation, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation, etymology lookup, LLMs, and tons of other tools.
Final point: do not assume code is somehow different. Code simply is structured text. Don't try to find perfect "code editor", prioritize plain text. Good plain text editors are the best code editors, but even the most sophisticated IDE at some points brings mostly frustration if it cannot nicely handle the simplicity of plain text.
"Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else."¹
Vim-navigation provides a mental and spatial "language" that enables efficient text manipulation through keyboard input. Rather than forcing your brain to process raw character chunks on the screen, it allows you to reason about text in meaningful units: letters, words, paragraphs, tags, nested structures - e.g., "delete everything between parentheses" - and more.
Sadly, we keep moving away from plain text conventions, making our work increasingly complicated. Have you ever tried quickly extracting text interwoven with code from Slack into your editor? Ever gotten mad when websites won't let you copy the content or use colors and fonts that make it unreadable?
I implore every programmer to reject the status quo and reclaim agency over text interactions - always find ways to deal with text on your own terms. For instance, I'm reading this thread and typing this very comment in my editor. Why wouldn't I? It has all the tools I need for it - vim-navigation, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation, etymology lookup, LLMs, and tons of other tools.
Final point: do not assume code is somehow different. Code simply is structured text. Don't try to find perfect "code editor", prioritize plain text. Good plain text editors are the best code editors, but even the most sophisticated IDE at some points brings mostly frustration if it cannot nicely handle the simplicity of plain text.
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¹. Graydon Hoare. Always bet on text - https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html