== Good editors aren't better or worse, just different

It's common to compare text editors and say that one is better or worse
than another. But after a certain point this is wrong. Editors are often
not better or worse but *different* than each other, each better at
specific things. Such differences mean that there is no absolute scale
of better and worse, and indeed that the question of which is a better
editor in general is meaningless.

Let me illustrate this using the differences between the three editors
that I use most frequently:

* _vi_ is the best [[sysadmin editor ../sysadmin/WhyViForSysadmins]],
  but it has distinct [[limits ../unix/ViLimits]]. For example,
  _vi_ is somewhere between so-so and terrible at editing multiple
  files at once.

  (I inexplicably skipped this _vi_ limitation before, perhaps
  because it is so much a part of _vi_ that I never think about
  it, much like a fish in water.)

* Rob Pike's [[sam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor)]]
  is the best [[graphical editor
  ../programming/GoodGraphicalInterfaces]] and the best editor for
  certain sorts of mass structured changes (within certain limits it
  has the best search and replace going, especially across multiple
  files). But it basically requires graphics and has nothing like smart
  indenting or the like.

* GNU Emacs is the best code editor, due to things like its freakishly
  superintelligent smart indenting and other extensions, but it is
  not suitable as a sysadmin editor and it is not as good a graphical
  editor as [[sam]].

Looking at this it is hopefully clear how absurd it would be for me
to claim that any of these editors was better or worse than any other
one. They are all good editors, and they are all different tools that
fit different situations best.

Note that a lot of this involves personal taste issues. For example,
how [[sam]] works is very much to my tastes, but probably inspires
violent loathing in some people. Good editors have (for lack of a better
description) an aesthetic, and either you like that aesthetic or you
don't (although, like music, you may find that an aesthetic grows on you
over time; _vi_'s aesthetic certainly has grown on me).

=== Sidebar: on IDEs and my editor list

If I did anything with Java or other highly structured languages, I
expect that I would add Eclipse or some similarly smart IDE to this
list; as it is I work in Python and C, neither of which are very
amenable to such things. (And in the brief time I tried Eclipse, it
had a distressing tendency to want to run a 'project', not just edit
files for me. As a sysadmin, I can't make an IDE 'project' out of every
package that I need to [[modify a bit ../linux/PatchingRPMsWithQuilt]].)