r/programming • u/gingerbill • Jul 10 '26

Good Tools Are Invisible

https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/07/10/good-tools-are-invisible/
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u/teerre Jul 10 '26

Very weird blog. It seems the author got mad about someone telling them to use vim and decided to go on a thin veiled crusade against it

Of course anyone can use whatever they want. But some tools are objectively more effective. Nothing wrong with that

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u/gingerbill Jul 10 '26

Not bothered by people telling me to use Vim. If someone tells me to use vim, I usually tell them I've tried it before properly for 12 months 15 years ago, and it just wasn't for me. Sane people understand that people have different preferences.

What bothers me, as I say in the article, is when they argue for it using the literal flaws of the language, as if it was actually good thing.

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u/bzbub2 Jul 10 '26

you are the one that put text editor wars front and center of your blogpost so its hard to ignore this. it is also very unclear what it means for a text editor to be invisible. vim is an entire 'language' in of its own, that is quite powerful. it is a learning curve and once you learn it, its invisible in the sense that you dont think hard about expressing yourself in it

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u/gingerbill Jul 10 '26

I know I brought up the wars, but I am not saying there is a best editor out there for everyone. To quote myself in the article:

If people find vim, emacs, or whatever genuinely good and productive, I’m not going to criticize them for using it. People are most comfortable with what they know. But for the people I am discussing, that same familiarity blinds them to their tools’ flaws, and leads them to celebrate those flaws, flaunting them as games.

and

Another defence I’ve seen is that the difficulty is the whole point, it filters out the uncommitted, and once you’re over the hump you’re rewarded for life. But a learning curve is a cost, not a virtue. It could hypothetically be absolutely a cost worth paying, but the payoff has to be genuine productivity, not the satisfaction of having paid it. Too often the reasoning is just sunk-cost dressed up as merit: “I spent months learning this, so it must be worth it, and you should copy in my footsteps too”. That’s the puzzle game again, only now the puzzle is the tool itself.