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Dull forks
December 24th, 2020
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For whatever reason, my brain has been churning through thoughts on design.
Anyone who writes software inevitably comes across a design choice even if they
are not consciously aware that there is a choice to be made.  This has real
implications for end-users on how their program are perceived and used.

Specifically, I've been reading small bits of "The Evolution of Everyday
Things" by Henry Petroski[1] as well as Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday
Things"[2] and mentally chewing on the pieces, one at a time.

As I am reading these books, I am reminded of all of the vapid arguments
from the so-called "Editor War"[3] which typically boil down to personal
preference.  But what is so fascinating is viewing the editor war arguments
under a lens of design -- why do people care so much about tiny little features
of a text editor when something like GNU Emacs and (neo)vi(m) are more than
capable of their main goal of editing text?

The tools that we use with any frequency become ingrained in us, and we impart
our own shape onto the tools that we constantly reach for first.  Petroski
discusses (at some length) hammers from craftspeople from the past who
have handles that appear to be bent in strange proportions but are actually the
result of the handles being warped by the hand of the person that used it
frequently until it had a 1:1 match of the grip of its owner.[4]

Here's a text-representation of the hammer (hopefully you support 200 character viewing, otherwise sorry!)

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There's also the part about the proliferation of specific variations of
hammers, nails, and dinnerware such as forks and knives.  These are all tools
that we as humans use with such frequency that a simple "good enough"
tool probably isn't practical for all of the various ways that we can employ
our tools.  Even a platonic ideal fork may not be as immediately useful as a
specialized fork in certain situations, hence the need for forks for eating
slippery food or food that is hard to reach inside of shells, jars, &c.

Text editors are the tools of anyone who works with a computer with any sort of
intimate frequency, so like our dinnerware we have developed specialized tools
to do text manipulation.  And so it makes sense that while a particular tool
would make more logical sense to someone more than another tool because they
may have different situations to employ the tool with.

Ultimately, what my point boils down to is that a proliferation of tools is a
good thing, even if a tool doesn't last then it may represent a node in an
evolutionary chain of other tools.  For anyone who is more than a lightweight
computer user, I think it behooves us to experiment and try out new tools for
our common and uncommon situations; we may discover something useful or a new
perspective that we were unable to see before.

Or to put it another way, our favorite editor is nothing more than a dull fork
but a trusted one at that.  And maybe our editor wars should instead reflect a
mindset of pushing others to experiment and think about the ways that interact
with a computer.

-----

As a side note, I recently started using 'ed'[5] for smaller edits of files.
It is surprisingly useful even today on high-res displays, especially if you
are already familiar with the 'ex' commands from vi and its offspring.  Even
more useful is turning on verbose mode ('ed -v') which gives you error messaging
when you (inevitably) screw up a command.

This little bit of time spent gaining knowledge of 'ed' has actually saved me a
considerable amount of potential time wasted trying to debug issues in Docker
containers.  Typically on very small containers, you may not even have access to
a fully functional terminal when accessing a shell on a running container,
which means full-screen editors like 'vi' may be impossible to use to display
anything properly.  But 'ed' can still be used since even the dumbest of
terminals can print lines.  This allowed me to go view and edit files in a
half-broken container instead of iterating through a cycle of building new
containers and slowly checking debug commands non-interactively when the
container has been executed.

[1] - https://archive.org/details/pdfy--rXmwRDB5uzq5MmU/page/n1/mode/2up
[2] - https://www.biblio.com/9780385267748
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war
[4] - https://imgur.com/d8hGy4D (sorry about that, I couldn't find a better image outside of imgur)
[5] - https://www.gnu.org/software/ed/manual/ed_manual.html