TL;DR Emacs is the way to go

Optimization is my way of procrastination. This time it is about getting a decent text editor. I am at the point where it is just annoying that all my text is getting scattered between different editors and that many times I have to open my same files under different editors to get what I need done.

Why IDEs never come with a spell checker? Is is just horrible to have poor spelling on any comment. I keep my personal notes in a zim-wiki , but it does not have completion nor syntax highlighting, cross-referencing documents is great and that is what wikis are for. I keep my plots in there, but I can’t generate them inside the document itself. And keeping track of which code generates which output has become quite insane. Despite git version control, and having a journal. Documents support a rich syntax, I can even embed and display math, I just can’t type it directly because I need to call an extra editor inside zim to do it. Then the equation does not get stored in the main file but on a separate one, and so for each equation. Making it tedious to keep track of all this files and their png outputs that are embedded in the displayed document.

Jupyter/Ipython solves the lab notebook use of my note taking. But Jupyter/Ipython is just slow in the web browser and the files are not version control friendly. It does embed MathJax for the math I need, and is dynamic in its evaluation. Indexing files is no really possible in the way a wiki works. Search is no possible either. And for every file I open I have to launch a new kernel that eats more of my machine resources.

So I accepted that I need to spend time into getting a tool that allows me to do my work. Here I put my criteria of what I need

But this challenges can’t be new, there must be a solution already. The truth is that getting all of it is not so simple. I must say that up to this experience point, it feels that VIM can’t be beaten in the text editing features, I may be to biased, but that’s the tool I started using when I had to edit files in remote servers, and gave me the best experience after the pain of learning it. It just feels so natural to keep the hands on the keys and not exaggerated keys combinations, it really feels like a text editing language on itself. And there are a lot of plugins to help you handle email and calendar and task list and planning. Using it in combination with the shell, seemed a good option for a long while, using ack to find the files I needed is an amazing alternative to indexing, it even makes me think why having at wiki index at all? But VIM just fails with my requirement of working with richer media. I just need to be able to put latex and figures in my files really badly, and I could not find a way to do that in VIM. Nor, that neovim would be able to do that in the near future.

If not VIM then what about its famous contestant? Emacs on the other hand, has this complicated key combinations, but it supports richer text, latex, and images. In fact, for some reason I blocked into my mind that a text editor can’t display images (despite having my wiki do it all the time, and web sites also do it). Text editors have a single font, single/uniform font height, and miss all the goodness of the graphical interface, only using some icon at the top of the screen. It was just after this Emacs talk , that it finally clicked into my mind all this was possible. That talk referenced Carsten Dominik talk giving me the scientific workflow framework that I wanted to adapt which was then complemented by a scipy talk showing it for a specific scientific workflow. That made it the winner for now. There is no other alternative to match that I could find. I’m still fighting with the learn process and there are still some rough parts that hinder me from living in Emacs. I didn’t plan to live in my text editor, but the Emacs philosophy does tend to drive me to it. I also don’t know if all this key combinations would be better handled with better keyboards that put the control keys closer to your thumbs keyboardio . The fact is that despite all our technological evolution. The best way to treat our information is plain text, and the best way to get our thoughts into the computer is a keyboard.

In the end, nothing survives if it doesn’t adapt to its surroundings, that is natural selection. The fact VIM and Emacs are still up I think is because we can adapt them to our work styles. Both are amazing, and each one might suit your needs at a different level. For me the solution came in Emacs, using evil-mode puts some sanity back into the text editing.