Wrongroom? Wrong thinking?

It’s saturday and I’m waiting to head out so I thought I’d dredge up an old topic from my pre-blogging days, oh so long ago. It was a post about WriteRoom where dive into mark puts up a little rant. I found it through daringfireball, who’s opinions I generally agree with and Gruber was into this posting. So I read the post and came away mildly perplexed.

If the posting had been simply a review/rant about Mark’s take on WriteRoom in particular and perhaps the full screen trend in general, I probably would have been in agreement although I don’t really have any strong feelings about it. The trend seems a little wierd to me but I understand that different people work in different ways, so whatever. The post starts out with a couple paragraphs of mildly silly ranting, funny but not overly convincing - there are many other examples of software that inspires other software. Unfortunately it seems to go completely off the tracks with this quote:

Here’s the basic problem: you’re writing a text editor.

“Huh,” I think to myself. Where’s he going with this. He follows that up with:

Stop doing that. It’s 2007. Saying to yourself “I’m gonna build my own text editor” is as silly as saying “I’m gonna build my own build system” or “I’m gonna build my own amusement park.” Blackjack and hookers and all that. Writing a great text editor is insanely difficult. There is a certain class of software that sounds easy but is actually insanely difficult.

Did he really suggest that the reason not to write an editor is that it’s hard to do? I read that paragraph several times to make sure I was understanding things and as far as I can tell, that’s what he is saying. Not only is he saying that, but he is condescending to every developer who ever started writing an editor suggesting that they were so naive to believe that it would be easy and he was imparting his magical wisdom on you that you could not possibly have understood yourself. Ok.. that was crazy, let’s carry on.

I guess the part I don’t understand is the target audience. Who is so serious about writing that they need a full-screen editor, but so unserious that they don’t have a favorite editor already? I’ve published two full-length books and posted a hell of a lot more than that, and you can pry my text editor from my cold dead hands. I’m not even going to mention which one it is; it doesn’t matter. Switching to a new one would be a frustrating and painful experience that would get in the way of my writing for weeks, maybe months.

What? Here again, I had to read this paragraph several times to make sure I understood. Is he honestly saying that everyone past, present and future has already selected the editor that they will be with for life? I will agree that as a vim user, I’m not switching anytime soon. But when I started out, I began as a pico user, moved on to emacs and then to vi. So, over the course of probably 2 years, I actually did switch editors several times. There are also tons of people for whom an editor isn’t the religion it is to some people. They are light users and just want to try different things. And, it also turns out, there are new people coming onto the scene that actually haven’t chosen their one true editor yet! Imagine!

So, to sum up, these are the possible things that I believe he could be saying in this post:

- people shouldn’t develop text editors because it’s hard
- people shouldn’t develop text editors because there are already a bunch that are currently in use
- he doesn’t personally like the current batch mentioned in the posting and thus no new software in the space could be good

All three of them are completely crazy talk. Completely.

Sigh, then he wraps things up with these choice bits:

These programs aren’t for serious writers at all. They’re for the writer’s equivalent of script kiddies — people who want to go to Starbucks and pick up chicks with their MacBooks and their iPods and their glowing full-screen text editors.

No doubt they will be wildly successful. Meanwhile, if you need me, I’ll be in the corner writing my next book with a real text editor. I think it even has a full-screen mode.

I mean, ok, sure it’s a religious war over your choice of editors and I’ve said worse things to emacs users in my day. But really… I honestly had been expecting better from a positive link off Daring Fireball.

Feb 17th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: feature · rant · software