The Productive Programmer

Chapter 15. Find the Perfect Tools

Throughout the book thus far, I’ve shown you how to solve various problems using a slew of different tools: batch files, bash scripts (both one-liners and full-blown scripts), Windows PowerShell, Ruby, Groovy, sed, awk, and a whole menagerie of big-eyed O’Reilly animals. Now the critical time has come. You’ve identified a problem that is causing grief and you want to automate it away: which tool do you use? The first tool you’ll probably use is a lowly text editor. So, I’ll start by talking about this perhaps most important tool in your arsenal.

The Quest for the Perfect Editor

Developers still spend a lot of time with plain text. No matter how many wizards and other sorcerers we develop, most coding is still in plain text. Most of the information you keep should also reside in plain text because you never know if the tool you are using will be around in five years. It’s a good bet that you’ll be able to read plain ASCII (and probably Unicode) for the next century or so. (As The Pragmatic Programmer [Addison-Wesley] admonishes: “Keep knowledge in plain text.”)

Because so much of what we do revolves around text, it makes sense to find your perfect text editor. This isn’t about IDEs; company policy and the language you use generally dictate that. IDEs are great at producing source code. But they are lacking in some of the best tools for plain old text. ...