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Screwdriver Narrowness Considered Harmful

Something I actually think about a lot just popped out in an email to an internet acquaintance who makes Mac software

Quote:
One thing to know about me (and probably a surprisingly large number of your customers and potential customers): there's very little mutual exclusivity in my software world. For example, I use TextEdit, Vim, and TextMate pretty much every day and for completely different things. To me it's like having several screwdrivers. I could be that guy who insists there's only One True and Good Screwdriver, but I prefer to keep them all handy and just grab the one I need for the job.

Does that make any sense?

I mean I hear these territorial pissing matches on `foo tool` vs. `bar tool`, and how the fate of the world turns on making the right decision one time, and then becoming some kind of viral evangelist. Meh.

There's stuff like Quicksilver and OS X in general where you inherently have to choose a platform. But what about text editors, graphics apps--jeez, even _notebooks_? Am I the only one who employs a stable of several different tools for a certain kind of task? Esp. where one is clearly better at one portion of the task than the others?

How about you?

fraserspeirs's picture

I was talking to a...

I was talking to a colleague about this last night and he used the term "editor schizophrenia".

I regularly flip between Xcode (for Cocoa), SubEthaEdit (for collaboration), BBEdit (for the big files that kill all other editors), TextMate (because I think it's interesting), and vi on remote servers. As a result, I'm horribly inefficient in all of them and I hate it. I want one editor for everything, but no other editor has the autocomplete and auto-indent features that Xcode has, yet Xcode is a weak general editor.

*sigh* Now I'm depressed thinking about this issue again.

 
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