Fine, I'll build my own text editor

Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs.

One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the screen editors of the day and saying we could write something better.

Somehow this turned into a competition, and we both spent all night racing against each other writing our editors. It was mostly silent except for the typing, interrupted by the occasional announcement of some feature that was now working to hopefully rattle the other.

In the morning the other student system programmer/admin, Norman Wilson, got in and saw what Karl and I had been up to.

Norman mentioned this in an email to Rob Pike. His response was something close to this:

> Everyone writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful.

It was only a couple years or so later that Rob Pike wrote a screen editor. I wonder if it made him feel important? :-)

Around 2001 when I started getting into Linux seriously, I was also reading a lot about cults - Scientology had recently, infamously, forced Slashdot to take down a comment about their secret practices.

One of the things I read was that a common cult trick was to demand that people re-learn basic skills so that they do them the "right" way, like reading (Scientology did that), eating (chew X times!), using the phone etc.

So here's this system that demands I need to learn basic text editing all over? Nope, not joining that cult! We Amiga kids had had graphical editors for a long time!

So I got the best modern text editor Linux had at the time, NEdit from fermilab. It was almost entirely CUA + the conventions we use today (which aren't entirely what we used in 2001). And the unusual features it had, such as square selection and X-style middle click copying, were quick to pick up. It was also tiny, both in binary size and memory footprint.

Sadly it didn't really survive the switch to utf-8. I switched to Slava Pestov's Jedit for many years, and did some cool things with its huge library of extensions. But when VSCode started doing IDE stuff better than most IDEs, I defected to that. Yes yes, electron, Microsoft, I know... but it's just so damn convenient.

Yep, I'm taking advantage of the times by using the exact same tools I have been for years, and if those fail me, I'll pay for one of the multitude of other high quality editors offered by companies who's business it is to make them, so I get back to writing things in them instead of paying even more to companies trying to persuade me to believe that those products are obselete.