PIBlog

I’ve been searching for the perfect editor ever since I started programming. I’ve found many along the way which have worked to get the job done, but I’ve never really found “The One True Editor.”

Yes, I have used Emacs, and no, it is not it. There are many things I enjoy about Emacs, but there are many things I dislike, and recently Emacs got to the point for me where the bad outweighed the good. I could write a whole post on why I’ve forsaken Emacs, but I’m not going to.

I’ve found a couple of editors which meet my minimum requirements of being small, simple, and easily extendable. They also have some cool features built in, which always helps.

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The Problem

There are many pieces of software in the world, but very few of them are anywhere near what one would consider “perfect.”

I don’t blame anyone in particular for this. Writing perfect software is quite difficult if the software is to accomplish any sort of non-trivial task. Some come close to the lofty goal of perfection.

Even still, there are certain areas where the mark has always been missed, if only enough to be slightly annoying. I’m being purposely vague here because there are lots of different things wrong with lots of different pieces of software. I’ll get more specific later.

Probably the biggest contributer to this problem is the fact that nobody really knows what perfect software is. I usually know what annoys me about a particular piece of software, but I’m not always sure what would be a better solution.

My solution

There are some types of software which have gotten closer than others to perfection. Web browsers, for example. I’ll readily admit that there are things which annoy me about Firefox, but on the whole it’s a good piece of software, and improving all the time. I have some ideas of my own about the was a browser should do certain things, and I’m not about to go hacking about in the monstrous labyrinth that is the Mozilla source code, so I’ve [started my own browser project][mybrowser]. It will probably never catch up with the other, “real” browsers, but it will keep me entertained and provide me a way to prototype various ideas I have for user interfaces.

There are also some good programming languages out there. Languages like Python, Erlang, and many others make programming “fun again.” Still, for every language there’s something that’s missing, or something that might be cool to be able to do, some area which has been left mostly unexplored. Once again, I’ve started [some][booter] [prototyping][stacklang] so I can play around with some new ideas and push some boundaries which I think should be pushed (or at least ones which look as though they may be fun to push).

So what’s the way to write perfect software?

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