Text Editor Intervention by Watts Martin (@chipotlecoyote). A sane but kind letter to Mac users who loved TextMate but think they need something more, and assume it has to be something new.

I agreed with every point - in particular the point about tabs being terrible for keeping track of lots of files. I often keep hundreds of files open in Emacs, and with iswitchb-mode enabled, it's easy to visit the one I want.

I can certainly sympathize with the urge to improve everyday tools. I a few half-written "reinventions" of mail clients, terminal emulators, template languages, time trackers and weblog frameworks littering my filesystem. But you do have to stop somewhere. The only program that's been as well explored as the extensible text editor is the command shell, and once you're out of college, you shouldn't write a new one of those either.

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