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February 27, 2014

Filed under: tech»coding

Just Use Ed

There's a regular, recurring movement to replace text-based programming with some kind of graphical version. These range from Scratch (offering "blocks" to make text syntax more friendly) to Pure Data (node-based dataflow programming). Rarely do any of them take off (Scratch and pd are successful within education and audio, respectively, but little-used elsewhere), but that doesn't stop anyone from trying.

It may be the fact that I started as a writer, or that I was a language nut in college, but I've always felt that text-based programming doesn't get a lot of respect. The written word is one of the great advances of civilization. You can pack a lot of meaning into a line of text, and code is no different. Good source code can range from whimsical to workmanlike, a gamut that's hard to imagine existing in the nest of wiring that is the graphical languages.

As a result, text editing is important to me. It's important to a lot of people, but most of them don't write an editor, and I ended up doing that. I figured I'd write up some notes on the different ways people have written their editors, and why I picked one model in particular for Caret. It may be news to many people that there are even multiple models to consider, but that's programming for you: there's at least four ways to put letters into a document, and bitter wars between factions for each of them.

The weirdest editor still in common usage, of course, is Vim. Born from the days when network connections were too slow to actually update text in realtime, Vim uses a shorthand language for text editing. You don't hold delete until some amount of text is gone in Vim — instead, you type "d2w", meaning "delete two words." You also can't type directly until you switch into the "insert" mode with the "i" or "a" commands. Like many abusive subcultures, people who learn this shorthand will swear up and down that it's the only way to work, even though it's clearly a relic of a savage, bygone age.

(Vim and Emacs are often mentioned in comparison to each other, because they tend to be used by very similar kinds of people who, nevertheless, insist that they're very different. I don't really know very much about Emacs, other than it's written in Lisp and it's not as eyeball-rolling weird as Vim, so I'm ignoring it for the purposes of this discussion.)

Acme tends to look a little more traditional, but it is actually (I think) more radical than Vim, because it redefines the relationship between interface and editor. Acme turns all documents into hypertext: middle clicking a filename opens that file, and clicking a word (like "copy" or "paste") actually runs that command (either in a shell, or in Acme). There's no fixed interface in Acme, just a set of menu bars that are also text fields. I love the elegance of this idea, where a person builds an text editor's UI just by... editing text.

Which brings us to Sublime. I've been very clear that Caret is modeled closely on Sublime, with a few changes to account for quirks of the platform and my own preferences. That's partly because it's generally considered the tool of choice for web developers, and partly because it's genuinely the editor that has my favorite workflow tools. Insofar as Sublime has a philosophy, it is to prioritize clarity and transparency over power. That's not to say it's not powerful — it certainly is. But it tries to be obvious in a way that other editors do not.

For example, say you need to change a variable name throughout a function. Instead of immediately writing a regex or a macro, Sublime lets you select all the instances of that variable with the mouse or keyboard, which creates multiple cursors. Then you just type the new name. It's not as powerful as a regular expression, but 90% of the time, it's probably what you wanted to do anyway. Sublime's command/go-to palette is another smart-but-obvious idea: instead of hunting through the menu or the filesystem, open the palette and type to fuzzy-filter the list. It's the speed of a command line without the hostility.

To paraphrase an old saw, the best feature is the one you have with you. That's why putting the command palette in Caret was a must, since it puts all the menu items just a few keystrokes away. Even now, I don't always remember where a given menu item is in the toolbar in my own editor, because I hardly ever use the mouse. There was a good week when menus looked completely wrong, and I never even noticed.

The reason I've started looking over other editors now is that I think Caret can reach for more than just parity with Sublime. I'm intrigued by the ways that Acme makes it easy to jump around files, and lately I've been thinking about what it means to be an editor built in "web technology." Adding the ability to open links from a URL is a given, but it's only the start: given that OAuth provides a simple, standard method of authenticating against a remote server, a File implementation for Caret could easily open files against service endpoints for something like Github or Ghost in a generic way. It would be a universal cloud editor, but easily capable of running locally.

Of course, Caret won't be the last editor to try something different (just this week, Github announced their own effort), but it's still pretty amazing how many ways we have to solve a simple problem like "typing letters into a file." As a writer and a coder, I love being spoiled for choice.

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