Re: Good ReStructuredText editors
Ben Finney <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.text.docutils.user |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Virgil Arrington <[email protected]> writes: > I've downloaded both VIM and Emacs, and I must say they both look > impressive in their respective feature sets, and their users seem > fiercely loyal. That last point is a special benefit of the tool, to the person considering what text editor to invest time in learning. The text editor used by a “knowledge worker”, if that term applies, can make a massive difference in how effective the person will be in their work. Investing time in a mediocre tool quickly turns out to be wasted time, even if the person doesn't know it for a long time. A free-software text editor with a diverse, passionate community, who have been using it over decades for a staggeringly wide variety of useful purposes, is a sign that the text editor will continue to meet its community's needs as those needs change into the future. This is only possible if the text editor is licensed as free software (i.e. granting software freedom to every recipient), so the passionate community is empowered to maintain and extend and support it, without any particular vendor being critical to its future. The only text editors I know which are free software, cross-platform, powerfully extensible, already adapted to countless editing tasks out of the box, and many-decades mature with a passionate community, are Vim and Emacs. > But, in both cases, as soon as I try to start using them, the learning > curve hits me in the face. They are sooooo different from anything > else I've ever used. I'd really like to learn them (or one of them), > but right now, it's a little like tackling Greek. You're right, that is a cost of these tools. You need to judge when to invest the effort needed to become proficient in one of those text editors. I can only say that what you learn of either of those tools will be valuable for the rest of your keyboard-using career, and beginning sooner will be better than beginning later. -- \ “Yesterday I told a chicken to cross the road. It said, ‘What | `\ for?’” —Steven Wright | _o__) | Ben Finney ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=164703151&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Docutils-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/docutils-users Please use "Reply All" to reply to the list.