Nate Meyvis

You already knew that "power user" text editors exist. But perhaps it helps to think of them as tools for taking all the ways that Word gently breaks you out of the metaphysics of pen and paper (e.g., what's close to what?), and going to eleven. [7/N]

Now imagine similar augmentations for copy/pasting, deleting, and everything else you can do in Word but can't with pen and paper (including at the meta-level: there's a one-keystroke "repeat the last command I gave, whatever that is"). That's what modern editors give you. [8/N]

What I find interesting and revealing is that getting all these superpowers is that I find them so much more valuable when I'm writing computer code than when I'm writing English (though it's useful in the latter case too). I have only partial explanations here. [9/9]

I think the distinction is that the pen and paper metaphor is not just historical deadweight, it does work as a metaphor, both for setting shared guidelines with the audience and for organizing one’s own thoughts.

It’s very common advice in the legal world that advice above a certain level of gravity or complexity should not be given or composed in Outlook, but should be written in word and either copied to an email or sent as an attachment.

This is both due to expectations (client will just skim an email for the main point and ignore the qualifiers) and quality (you as the author will get too into the metaphor of a conversation to be appropriately rigorous in the analysis).

More obviously, text composed in Word vs PPT vs Excel is radically different, which is largely due to the capacities and limits of the platforms and the common uses, but also due to the way people think when using them.

I don’t have direct experience here, but it makes sense that maximizing keystroke-level productivity is key when you’re coding in the realm of abstract logical thought, but tapping into metaphors can be more valuable than saving keystrokes when good metaphors are available.