Article URL: https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/07/10/good-tools-are-invisible/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858121 Points: 60 # Comments: 35

TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker. One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool’s shortcomings and reselling them as a “puzzle game” which is “fun” to solve. Let’s take vim as an example This is just an example, and applies to other editors too.. I constantly see some people praise it not for what actually makes it good, but by taking the things it’s bad at and turning them into a puzzle to have “fun” solving. I’ve had people tell me how “fun” it was to build a macro to handle some one-off text-refactoring problem. But when I looked at what they were doing and how long it took, my honest reaction was: I could have done that in Sublime in a minute with multiple cursors, or just written a quick script. To be clear, I’m not saying text editors don’t matter to your workflow. I’m questioning the near-religious devotion people have to a tool because it gives them a “hacker vibe”—which is basically the whole appeal for newcomers to vim or emacs. That’s what I mean by “invisible tools”. When you’re proficient with your editor of choice—whatever it is—it disappears into the background. But the moment it cannot handle something easily, it stops being invisible. What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great. I know plenty of things wrong with my own editor of choice: Sublime. I don’t dress those flaws up as fun little puzzles to solve. I just get annoyed that it lacks the tools I actually need, forcing me to write a plugin or reach for a separate program to write to transform text the way I want. I’ve been using Sublime for 15 years now. It’s my editor of choice for a few reasons: its shortcuts are a superset of the graphical OS environment (which minimizes the mental context-switch when moving between applications), multiple cursors really are better than macros 99.999% of the time I think I’ve only “needed” a macro in Sublime twice in the past decade, and in both cases, setting up the macro took longer than if I just wrote a script to do the same thing. (since they give direct visual feedback), and it leaves me with the fewest “puzzles” to solve in my text-editing workflow. I’ve found something like vim to be better at basic editing but worse at bulk operations—and I don’t mean grep-like operations—which is why I’ve stuck with Sublime for so long. I never found vim motions to be that much more productive than my Sublime workflow either, and that wasn’t just down to lack of trying or familiarity To be honest, I have forgotten most of my “vim motions” knowledge over the years, because I don’t regularly exercise it, nor do I need to.. And since I virtually never write code in a terminal, my need for a terminal-oriented editor is effectively nonexistent.