Introduction: The Pondering I’ve been doing my traditional semi-annual pondering of my tooling, and I’ve noticed that I’m going round and round on the same subjects: IDEs are a Good Idea, at their core Text Editors are a Better Solution to editing Language tooling ≫ third-party tooling The mouse is not the problem (menus are) IDEs are a Good Idea This thought mostly comes from thinking about Smalltalk1, and how much it got right.

It’s all just composability, do what you want The Editor(s) of a Lifetime I first started using Emacs in 2008, as a 12 year old. At the time, my reasoning was simple: I didn’t want to figure out Vim modes. I had just gotten into Linux for the first time, and was overwhelmed with excitement. I learned the basic movement commands, and I learned to save and open files, but other than that, I mostly used it like Microsoft Notepad.