The Hammer

Photo by Fer Troulik on Unsplash

I’m a restless writer. I move back and forth between writing tools like a child changes crayons. I recently spent part of a weekend reviving an old interest in the Vim text editor, rebuilding my configuration file and installing plugins that made it friendlier for writing prose.

Then I came upon an online discussion about text editors, another entry in the old vi vs. emacs wars that have been fought among geeks for decades, and that old feeling hit me again: am I using the best editor? Am I using the right editor? My head tells me it doesn’t matter, but my restless heart isn’t so sure.

I should make it clear I’m not a developer. I don’t write code, I write prose. Why do I care about text editors that are really meant for developers? Shouldn’t I just install Microsoft Word and be done with it?

The thing is, I abandoned word processing software years ago. There are all sorts of economic and philosophical reasons to not like Word, or Apple’s Pages (which comes free with my Apple hardware) or Google Docs (free, whether or not you trust or even like Google) or even LibreOffice Writer (which is just plain free), but my biggest beef is that they all have proprietary file formats. And when you switch between writing programs as much as I do, that’s a big beef.

So there I was, paging through yet another argument about text editing software, with a…