The tools I use every day tend to become personal. Not just because of the time I’ve invested learning to use them and getting them set up the way I like them, but also because of the way they interact with my personal history. While I have technical reasons for using the tools that I do, I’d be deluding myself if I didn’t also recognize that the choices I’ve made over the years are as much a product of personal circumstances than they are of technical superiority.

I first encountered real (not Notepad) text editors when I started playing with Linux and had to edit configuration files.¹ At first I didn’t have much of an appreciation of their power, but upon developing a number of RSI’s in my hands I began to see the value in thoughtful ergonomics. When I started grad school, I decided to see what I could do with taking notes in a real text editor. Emacs was my first attempt. I found it fantastic for code editing but it couldn’t do proper line wrapping; that was a complete deal breaker for me. So I switched to Vim.

I found Vim to be the most incredibly annoying thing in the world at first, but it did line wrapping and it had some very nice color schemes. And I could figure out how to customize it.²Once I got used to it, I fell in love. It didn’t take long for me to figure out the modal editing, remap my caps lock to escape, and get commands like :wq hard-coded into my muscle memory.

Since then, one of the most important questions I ask about any editor is, “Does it have Vim key-bindings.” That’s quite a big effect caused simply because Emacs didn’t have proper line wrapping. I have, over the years, come up against some limitations in Vim. I’ve written my entire dissertation in XeLaTeX, and while Vim’s latexsuite is great for a lot of things, it hasn’t been updated in years and doesn’t handle some of the more advanced bibliography features particularly well. As a humanist, I use BibLaTeX rather than vanilla BibTeX and since one of the big reasons for using LaTeX at all is the bibliography management, it has to work.

So I started looking around again, and discovered that Emacs has AucTeX, one of the greatest packages in the history of LaTeX. And it has muse mode, and org mode, both of which are fantastic for writing. And in recent years it developed proper line wrap. And, here is the kicker, it has a full Vim emulation mode via Evil. I had grown enough as a programmer that I could figure out how to make it do what I wanted it to as well.

Now I do most of my code editing (and blogging) from Sublime Text 2. It also has decent Vim emulation and I find it much more comfortable than Emacs for html, css, and sass. But it still can’t beat AucTex (or even come close) for hard-core LaTeX editing.

The point of all this isn’t to enter in the Editor Wars (since I use the best of both Vim and Emacs, I’m an apostate according to both sides), but rather to point out that while technical considerations do matter when picking tools, I suspect that many of us mask our very human responses to particular tools and work flows under those technical considerations.