Y’know, I was all set to give an answer…and then I couldn’t remember why. It totally escapes me. It might have to do with Markdown. I’d been editing Markdown files at the time, so it might have been frustration with previewing Markdown. We could get into whether it’s a good idea to edit Markdown in a code-oriented editor, but I like it.
But then once I’d given Spacemacs a try, I ended up going down the rabbit hole. It’s not just vi-like mode; if you want that, use Evil. The batteries-included nature of the addon means that you get Evil, as well as several addons that they’ve rebranded as layers that make life easier. I can’t stress this enough; almost all my configuration boiled down to uncommenting stuff in ~/.spacemacs.
Nice. I’ll have to check it out next time I’m feeling antsy to try something new. I’ve lately been using vscode and despite not being totally sold at first, I’m starting to really enjoy the hell out of is my go-to quickie editor of choice for code and things like markdown when a full IDE like Visual Studio is too heavy for what I’m trying to do.
If you’re editing a lot of Markdown (or reStructuredText) I’d recommend checking out the Atom Editor. It’s not exactly light-weight, but it has good MD and RST preview capabilities.
I recall some special on the making of Star Trek where one of the guest stars was talking about how she tapped a lot on the terminal props when she’s stealing a spaceship or some such to give a convincing performance, and later got dirty looks from the sound people who had to add a sound for every tap.
I really dig Atom; one of my problems with it is that plugins tend to trample over each other, and when they do, they tend to cancel each other out. It kinda sucks if you’re used to using Emmett, type html, hit tab, and it just sits there mocking you.
Also, I have an old netbook that I’m literally about to take out to my back porch to type, and Atom on an old Atom processor gives me visions of trying to run Emacs back in the early 90s.
Other than those two things, I have Atom installed and do use it on occasion for text editing. And huh, what variant of Markdown does Markdown use?
Huh. Y’know, that makes me wonder if he got interviewed during the making of Galaxy Quest. He’s half-jokingly said for years that it was the best Star Trek movie ever made, and there’s that whole thing of the Thermians basing the controls on his movements and Tommy’s line about him having a system worked out in his head.
Totally agree with him, btw. Enterprise tried to tackle the reasons for the Prime Directive, A Piece of the Action, Who Watches the Watchers, the beginning of Star Trek: Into Darkness, etc. tried to tackle the notion of contaminating a culture, but man, I think Galaxy Quest nails it and does it in a way that Trek never did: an advanced society tainted by a primitive culture.
I’d like to think that the now-dead sequel or TV series would tackle a subject like having the old crew come back onto Mathazar’s ship, only to be horrified to learn that the Thermians have become more like Sarris.
But he’s using two fingers! That makes him twice as efficient! With a little practice, he’ll be able to type two whole words per minute. (as long as they’re single-letter words like ‘a’ or ‘I’)
Atom’s fun for coding but it’s a bit heavyweight for anything not-really-coding related. I use Haroopad for most of my writing. Slightly unstable but usually recovers what you were working on if it crashes. I wouldn’t actually recommend it since it’s quirky and sometimes crashy. It does MMD and has nifty things like Mermaid, Github flavored markdown, some PHP-style markdown extensions, table of contents (sucks but it kind of works), math (I can’t speak to this; I don’t math in any formal way), and some (annoying to use) Regular Expression support.
I’m sure there’s something better out there that has all of the above but Haroopad is cross platform and has neat things I’ve only found in apps that were both $$ and single-platform. (I don’t mind paying for software but single-platform applications are just about a deal-killer for me at this point.)