
Choosing a Text Editor: An Important Decision Demystified - tndl
https://medium.com/@tindleaj/choosing-a-text-editor-an-important-decision-demystified-c414baf8dba8
======
theonemind
I usually find extensibility a kind of Turing-tarpit of distraction. You
download extensions, try to configure them, get a good flow through them, etc.
You have to try extensions, find good ones, and replace them as old ones stop
getting maintained. You have to upgrade extensions, deal with breakages, and
so on. They frequently don't have the same quality as the core, and bring
their own bugs/problems along. When I have extensibility, I mostly try not to
use it.

Mostly, I'll take something that packs a decent amount of what I'd want into a
first-party integrated package and live with it. On the other hand, I don't
mind opening a terminal and doing an in-place transformation on a file with
perl, or opening vim/vi on a file, doing something, saving it, and coming back
to my original editor to say "yep, load those changes from disk."

Syntax highlighting seems overrated to me. I haven't really felt any
functional difference in how well I parse things either way.

~~~
tndl
I think I definitely agree with you to an extent. However, I think
extensibility is something that for a beginner can be very helpful. Code
formatters, linters, git integrations and even code snippets can be super
helpful for someone who is trying to get their head around new concepts. But
you're right, once you've reached a level where tools like vim, git, and other
lower level solutions, editor extensions can become superfluous.

