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The Embellishment of Editors
Sometimes I really do think that I’m no longer in control of what I’m doing.
I really do think that the only positive enhancements in the editing process over the past 50 years, aside from actually moving to multi-line editing¹ (when the bandwidth became available), are firstly the including of syntax highlighting, and secondly the auto-completion of function names (and subsequently information on their parameters).
And, to be completely honest, I could work pretty well without either of them. They’re a nice to have, but they’re not essential. They improve the development process, but they don’t obstruct it. They make you smile, don’t get in the way, and don’t annoy you at any time.
Mind you, perhaps if you grew up using them as a crutch then maybe you’d find it very hard to do anything without them? There’s a good reason to force everyone to learn vi keyboard commands if ever I heard one. Learn data structures, points, and vi commands. Job done. ESC^ZZ
They’re also hilariously easy to configure, just the once, and leave alone pretty much forever². Pretty much at the same level of fixing up your .vimrc, .bashrc, or .zshrc.
Point being, I’d say, conservatively, that syntax highlighting and auto-completion occupy fully 99.9% of the useful things that a code editor can reasonably do for a…
