Good Tools Are Invisible - gingerBill

-->

TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.

One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool’s shortcomings and reselling them as a “puzzle game” which is “fun” to solve.

I don’t want my tools to be “fun”. I want my tools to be invisible.

Text Editor Wars<br>Let’s take vim as an example

This is just an example, and applies to other editors too.. I constantly see some people praise it not for what actually makes it good, but by taking the things it’s bad at and turning them into a puzzle to have “fun” solving.

I’ve had people tell me how “fun” it was to build a macro to handle some one-off text-refactoring problem. But when I looked at what they were doing and how long it took, my honest reaction was: I could have done that in Sublime in a minute with multiple cursors, or just written a quick script.

To be clear, I’m not saying text editors don’t matter to your workflow. I’m questioning the near-religious devotion people have to a tool because it gives them a “hacker vibe”—which is basically the whole appeal for newcomers to vim or emacs.

That’s what I mean by “invisible tools”. When you’re proficient with your editor of choice—whatever it is—it disappears into the background. But the moment it cannot handle something easily, it stops being invisible. What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great.

I know plenty of things wrong with my own editor of choice: Sublime. I don’t dress those flaws up as fun little puzzles to solve. I just get annoyed that it lacks the tools I actually need, forcing me to write a plugin or reach for a separate program to write to transform text the way I want.

I’ve been using Sublime for 15 years now. It’s my editor of choice for a few reasons: its shortcuts are a superset of the graphical OS environment (which minimizes the mental context-switch when moving between applications), multiple cursors really are better than macros 99.999% of the time

I think I’ve only “needed” a macro in Sublime twice in the past decade, and in both cases, setting up the macro took longer than if I just wrote a script to do the same thing. (since they give direct visual feedback), and it leaves me with the fewest “puzzles” to solve in my text-editing workflow. I’ve found something like vim to be better at basic editing but worse at bulk operations—and I don’t mean grep-like operations—which is why I’ve stuck with Sublime for so long. I never found vim motions to be that much more productive than my Sublime workflow either, and that wasn’t just down to lack of trying or familiarity

To be honest, I have forgotten most of my “vim motions” knowledge over the years, because I don’t regularly exercise it, nor do I need to.. And since I virtually never write code in a terminal, my need for a terminal-oriented editor is effectively nonexistent.

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.

Tools as an Identity<br>Part of why these debates turn religious is that a tool choice becomes a flag you plant—it says something about who you are. The “hacker vibe” isn’t a mere aesthetic; it’s tribal signaling, and that’s the real trap. Once your identity is invested in a tool, admitting its flaws starts to feel like admitting something about yourself. So people don’t just tolerate the flaws—they defend them, and eventually flaunt them. You cannot have an honest conversation about a tool with someone who’s decided the tool is part of their personality.

Feeling Productive versus being Productive<br>The text-editor-macro anecdote I mentioned is really about a gap between feeling productive versus being productive. There’s a sensation of cleverness that comes from solving a fiddly problem, and it’s easy to mistake that feeling for actual output. A tool that makes hard things feel heroic and clever feel like an achievement can register as “powerful” while quietly being slow. The honest test isn’t how engaged or clever you felt, it’s wall-clock time and how many mistakes you made getting there. A lot of the tools people evangelize would lose that test.

If productivity is actually the goal, actually question your own views on this, and try to see what makes you more productive. You will be surprised when you do.

Terminal UIs vs GUIs<br>Another example in this same vein is when people advocate for terminal apps over GUIs. If you’re stuck in a terminal all day, then I completely get the obvious advantage, but most programmers aren’t stuck in a terminal all day.

From those people who generally...