Twenty-Year Tools

I've used a lot of text editors over the years.

Back when I used Windows, I wrote my code in Notepad++.
Later, when I moved to Mac, I switched to using Sublime Text.
Later still, I switched to using Atom, and later again — when Microsoft bought Github and it looked like the writing was on the wall for the Atom editor — I switched to using VS Code.
Finally, about a year ago, I switched to using Vim.

I say "finally" because I'm planning on using Vim for the next twenty years at least. Vim is a twenty-year tool.

Vim isn't easy or intuitive to use — in fact, it's infamous for its learning curve. But the relatively small initial investment of time it takes to learn Vim will pay off not just for years to come but for decades.

How can I be so sure? Well, Vim is no spring chicken, it's already been around for a long time. It was first released in 1991, which means that — as I write this — it's already 29 years old. And Vim was designed as an improved version of an older editor, Vi, which was first released in 1976. That makes it older than me, and I'm no spring chicken myself.

Fads and frameworks come and go, but the longer I've been programming, the more I appreciate tools that stick around. Vim, Emacs, Bash, C, SQL, Markdown... There's a long list of tried and tested tools in the programming world.

Personally, I love playing with new tools and technologies — that's a big part of why I love working as a programmer — but when I'm assessing a new tool, one of the questions I ask myself is: can I see myself still using this tool in twenty year's time?

All choices involve trade-offs, and sometimes the best tool for today is the temporary hack that gets us through to tomorrow, but whenever I have the luxury, I'm always going to opt for the twenty-year tool.