The very first text editor 3652

This might be a fairly significant point ....

Many of us (well, true of me anyway) are probably speaking from the point of view of someone composing text, or making his-her own edits, rather than from the point of view of someone making changes marked up by someone else (I think that's what you mean by "editing professional"? but I might be wrong). Possibly what we find to be a useful set of tools is different from what would be useful to the "editing professional".

For example, when I'm writing code, I find it really helpful for the program I'm using to record the code to help with indentation, as emacs and vim can be set up to do. I don't know how useful that would be to someone doing the kinds of editing tasks I think you have in mind. emacs and vim also support multiple (text) "windows", which is useful when doing something involving multiple files. vim has a mode that shows differences between two files. The list could go on and on .... but again, I don't know how helpful any of these features would be to someone making already-marked-up changes.

Is it "non-qwerty keys", or "keys I can't touch-type"? the latter is pretty significant, all right, but ....

Well, for straight data entry, emacs would seem to be ideal, since you enter text by .... entering text (no ctrl- or alt- combinations weirdness needed).

But now you're talking about developers, who are often happy to expend a couple of microseconds of brain power to remember some obscure ctrl- or alt- combination if it will save typing. (Did your bit gods use the same tools as the folks whose job was data entry and correction? and maybe more importantly, did they use them in the same way, and find the same features useful? Just asking.)

And it *would* be interesting to know whether anyone has tried to correlate developer productivity with tools. I have minimal experience with IDEs ("Interactive Development Environments"), but some of them, despite the annoyingness of not being vim, have some nice features that do save time. Whether that makes up for the lack of straight text-editing features, hm, it would be interesting to know.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.