Nate Meyvis

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.

Also common and related legal advice: documents that need to be seriously analyzed should be printed and annotated by hand, even though everyone understands how useful the superpowers you lose are.

Useful thread. Thanks. I should have been clearer that some of the difference isn't mysterious at all. Operations like "delete everything up to the next semicolon" are very common in code and much less common in writing. [1/N]

Slightly more generally, the fact that the line is so often a logical unit in code makes operations on lines really valuable in editing code. And, again, "go to the last place where the current token appears" is very common in code, less so in English. [2/N]

And, again, I'm interested that the best setups (for me, and I guess also for @jasoncummings86) are these stitched-together hybrids. Vim and Emacs have a large set of out-of-the-box commands, but in OS-like contexts where all sorts of customization etc. is possible. [3/N]