Nate Meyvis

Finally, the case of writing software (IDEs and so on) is a neat case study in technological progress. I'd love to read more about it if anyone has suggestions. [9/9]

I didn’t understand 3/4 of this, but the last point about writing and the word processor seems absurdly ridiculous important.

So, I've been mulling this over for a while. If I were to expand on the thing you highlighted specifically, I'd say: Why, exactly, does the average person use Word instead of writing freehand? (1) There's the advantages of a computer: saving, sharing, etc. [1/N]

(2) Many people can type faster than they can write. (3) There are certain superpowers you get. I think a lot of people overrate (2) and underrate (3). I'm specifically thinking of copy/paste and find[/replace]. [2/N]

It's a remarkable thing, when you think about it: you can put text into a magical area where you can retrieve it later. You can edit a bunch of things at once. These are intuitive enough to be popular but require thinking of the program not just as a virtual tablet. [3/N]

What other magic might you want out of a word processor? Since you aren't constrained by the physics of hand movement, you'd want to rethink "motion." What if it were equally easy to move the cursor (i) back one character, (ii) back to the previous whitespace, [4/N]

(iii) back to the last occurrence of "Jefferson," (iv) back to the last instance of whatever word is under your cursor right now, (v) back to the last blank line, or (iv) [any other reasonable thing you can think of? Many people use (ii) (CTRL+left in various apps). [5/N}

You will not be surprised to learn that all of these, and many more, are out-of-the-box, one- or two-keystroke commands in Vim (and other such text editors). (OK, (iii) is two keystrokes plus the text you're searching for.) [6/N]