First time I've ever seen "That comment was too long." on HN.

This is part 2 of 2.

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> 3. Execution is a skill. If you ever tried to do any of the things you read so much about (as opposed to just reading & talking), you'd find you completely lack experience in doing. You seem to be living under an illusion that you're acquiring skills. You are not.

This was actually exactly what I was trying to say before. You said it a lot more succinctly than I did:

> The idea that studying a subject with the notion that improving our understanding of that subject will make us better at it does hold true for a lot of areas and domains, but I think it tends to break down in a lot of the creative process.

You make an undeniable point. I also noted that:

> Unfortunately, this seems to be a rather hard idea to grasp, and there's a bit of a learning curve to it.

and I wish I was making faster progress...

> You sound smart. Very smart. Almost too smart for your own good. But intelligence - and knowledge - is not enough. You need to jump off that psychological cliff before you build it up so high the fear will stop you from ever making the first step.

Thanks. I've had exactly this problem for quite some time. It actually got to a point where I nearly became fully mentally detached and went off the deep end - I was thinking about ideas I had until I'd find a hole somewhere, then scrabble around frantically until I found the first thing that sounded like it would fix that problem, at least in theory. Do that for long enough, without any groundedness, going entirely off of "reasonable guesses".... welp. :D I've thankfully moved past those anxiety issues!!

In my case the psychological wall is built up as a side effect of another process: the fact that my attention span is like a broken bicycle that I can be pedaling as fast as humanly possible, but which will gradually slow down halfway up the hill, stop, and begin rolling backwards (all while I'm pedalling at crazy speed). So no matter how much interest I have and no matter how much effort I invest (my current project, the crawler, being a textbook-for-me case in point) I always roll to a stop.

This has perplexed me for years - depression/mood doesn't quite nail it, since I can crack up at stuff on Imgur and Reddit all day (well, not all day, those websites are like chewing gum, they dry out after an hour or so at the most), and my perspective is not predominantly dark/black, which I would think is a prerequisite for behavior that could be argued looks like "giving up."

I've learned a bit about the foundational health issues behind my autism, OCD, nutrition absorption problems, brain fog, etc etc, and made some good progress with correcting those problems - particularly issues with mental clarity - but I still have quite a ways to go, as I've noted above.

> Having said that: close your web browser. Open your editor. You already have enough inspiration; now you need code. That's all you'll hear from me.

Oh yeah, I've been thinking of writing a text editor for a while now... :P

In all seriousness, my motor coordination is terrible (I use two fingers to type with, and sometimes my muscles jump) so text editors with complex shortcuts involving multiple keys or key sequences that must be executed perfectly are a deal-breaker for me. Stuff like CTRL+S is my current comfort-zone limit for keyboard shortcut complexity, although I wouldn't mind something like making the Shift or Ctrl key itself save too. If I don't use a function as frequently then I don't mind, but I save almost obsessively (I use file alteration watching to rerun my code) - I actually just hit ^S while typing that :D (I don't usually do that in Chrome, lol) - so I prefer "single-chord" or single-step keyboard shortcuts. I never used WordStar when I was younger, I guess?

I don't like that it's impossible to completely filter out the religious pretentiousness of emacs and vim, which both have their pros and cons. But vim is installed by default in most places, and I can see effort was made to give it user-friendly default keybindings, so it's what I learned (or more accurately, know I'll be able to use without learning :P). emacs is essentially where all IDEs got their inspiration, so is associated with carefully-finetuned installation and configuration, and (arguably) associated themes of fragility. I get a very "this UI is a carefully designed optical illusion" vibe from emacs, like the last time I ran it and played with the package installer I discovered that the entire UI locks up while it's doing network requests (IIRC). Fun.

So yeah, I want a simple editor that follows widespread traditions, but also one that offers some obscure things like realtime syntax highlighting/formatting similar to QBasic's editor, which I've not found in any other environment (!).

> PS. If you follow my advice and start building things instead if just thinking about it, you'll find your creations don't even begin to live up to your expectations. That's normal; it simply shows the discrepancy between what you are and what you could be.

I really really like this way of interpreting this. It's very motivating. Thanks!

Btw, I followed you on tumblr. :P