It may not come as a surprise given the page you're on right now, but I've been a fan of plain text for a long time.
Maybe because of my love of reading, and my enjoyment of building ideas with words. Maybe because I was good at typing when I was a little kid, back when typing was not a common skill, and I never stopped enjoying it.
I don't claim to be good at writing as such. Heck, I don't even claim to have something interesting to say. But I write because I can't help writing, and over time I've learned that sometimes the ideas that come out can help others, and so it's a good thing to put this out there.
I have been using emacs for many years as my primary work tool. I also use emacs to keep running lists of work, to write posts in HTML or markdown, to do quick tasks like sorting text, or math, or checking the calendar. Or running git. Or keeping track of my favorite RSS feeds. Or to read those pages in a text-centric browser experience.
The one exception is I code in a more fully-feature IDE. I've tried using emacs for coding, but Visual Studio is a very well-tuned tool at this point, and I haven't really found something that replaces them.
I've had a couple of good friends recommend vscode (VSCode?) to me recently, and so I decided to give it a try.
So far, as a general text editor it feel responsive enough, it has decent integration with code editing (better than emacs for the projects I've been working on). I haven't done too much with git yet, but it seems to be well integrated.
I've been asking around about a good feed reader, and maybe something to read text as well. Calendar I don't mind as much, and frankly calc is way, way more powerful than I need for my day to day work. My friends challenged me to build the extensions that are missing myself, so perhaps I'll be learning TypeScript soon.
Whatever your tool of choice, happy typing!
Tags: coding