By far my most heavily used program is KEdit which is a PC version of the IBM VM/CMS editor XEDIT written by an IBM guy in Paris.

In both cases, there is a macro language based on Mike Cowlishaw's Rexx which is elegant.

Why such heavy use of KEdit? I am a heavy computer user, and, except for Web browsing, nearly all my computer input is via typing. So, the first issue has to be, what software to type into?

Well, I don't want to type into just a standard graphical user interface (GUI) 'multi-line text box' 'control' because the functionality is meager.

Yes, I'm a Windows user: So, in particular I don't want to type into Outlook or Visual Studio. Since my most important work is applied math, I use TeX for that and for all my high quality word whacking; so, I don't want to type into Word. I use SQL Server Management Studio for data base 'browsing' but won't type anything important into it.

So, here's much of what I type into KEdit:

(1) e-mail to send,

(2) input to TeX for mathematical and high quality word whacking,

(3) blog posts such as this one,

(4) notes on everything I want to remember in programming, shopping, equipment repair, medical care, financial records, phone numbers, addresses, abstracts of Web pages -- everything,

(5) software source code, including T-SQL for input to SQL Server,

(6) most of my important program test input,

(7) looking at program test output,

and more.

E.g., a little KEdit macro does my telephone dialing. Another little KEdit macro types mailing labels.

More? I'm developing a Web site; it's my first serious HTML programming. Since I'm a Windows user, I'm using ASP.NET. Well, I want some good logging for the Web site. ASP.NET has some default logging, but I didn't like it. Well, .NET also has some lower level tools for logging; these tools do handle the important issues of multiple threads of multiple programs on multiple machines all writing to the same log at the same time. Good -- that's the crucial functionality I needed.

So, now I have some good data logging.

Since the log file is 'circular', the first thing to do when reading one is to sort it on, say time, date, and machine. And with multiple log files, there can be some duplicate lines. In using the log files it can be important to 'select' lines based on the user's IP address, the name of the Web page, the routine in the Web page that wrote the line to the log, the message number of the message within the routine, etc. Sure, all this can be done with relational data base, but for log files of reasonable size it can also all be done more easily just within KEdit, especially if write a few KEdit macros.

So, I look at and do the first cut analysis of log files just within KEdit.

To be clear, on the title of the article 'On The Flight to Old Text Editors', I never left my "old text" editor. I've been using KEdit or XEDIT since 1985 and was using good text editors before then.

Alternatives? I see no good alternatives.

Why?

Well, the article lamented:

"That a new generation of programmers flocking to these old tools is concerning, if for no reason more selfish than the desire for peers in my dissatisfaction. Without a consensus that we can do better, there’s no incentive, no motivation, no market for improvements. If as modest a step towards a better editor as TextMate is abandoned, what hope is there for a true leap forward?"

Well, there's been no "true leap forward?" apparently mostly because of the overwhelming theme of the 'graphical user interface' (GUI) from the bean bag chairs and 'cognitive psychology' people at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the use of GUI ideas by Apple, Microsoft, X-Windows, and now, with further development, smart phones.

In particular an important special case has been the Web and Web browsers.

The PARC goal was to make computer interaction easy for the pre-school children of the PARC employees for future Xerox office machines, and the approach was to have a user interface much like that on, say, a microwave oven.

So, with GUIs what we've got is for pre-school children using microwave ovens, and that's not promising for a "true leap forward".

So, the assumption in the computer industry has been that humans should interact with computers via a GUI, almost exclusively.

For a user mostly just receiving information, maybe that assumption is okay, but, for a user generating information, no.

The good text editors were designed by some of the best programmers ever for use by some of the best programmers ever. So, it's no surprise that good programmers prefer good text editors.

Bluntly, for generating information, it is still very important to type, and so far for people doing a lot of typing a good text editor is by far the best software to type into, in particular, much, Much, MUCH better than any of the check boxes, radio buttons, text boxes, and multi-line text boxes of the GUI standards.

In particular, for programming, I've been doing that for a long time. I've always found programming to be fast, fun, and easy giving the input just via a good text editor. I could count on one hand all the times I got any benefit from 'interactive debugging' tools.

So, I tried Visual Studio. I saw a window with many 'panels', and I could never find what all the panels were for. Some of the panels were said to be 'dockable', and the intended meaning was obscure and not in my copy of Webster's. The one little window was cramped, and in strong contrast when I program I typically have a dozen or so windows open at once, using either KEdit or my favorite Web browser, for entering source code, for documentation, for earlier versions of the program, for other programs I can use as samples, for various notes, for program output, for searching for information on Google, etc. The one cramped window from Visual Studio is, in comparison, a bad joke. For just the typing, Visual Studio gives me just some little panel within the one window, and KEdit is MUCH better. It's easy to write powerful macros in KEdit, and I do, and I saw no promising way to write macros in Visual Studio.

When I saw that with Visual Studio the work is to be a 'project' and even a project to report "Hello World" starts with 50 MB, I concluded that Visual Studio was from the far side of Xerox PARC in luna-land.

For my present development I'm mostly using just Visual Basic .NET via a script program from command line text windows. I'm thrilled: The complier is fast, easy to invoke, gives good error messages, so far appears to be essentially free of bugs, and generates surprisingly small EXE files. Terrific. What's in the Visual Studio 50 MB has to be glop, gorp, and goop I very much don't want to have to work with when things go wrong, and with that much glop, gorp, and goop some things are very likely to go wrong.

So, yes, I do a lot of typing and do my typing into the best text editor I know of, KEdit.