Text editors I no longer use

These are all the text editors that I’ve tried out and why I’m no longer using them. More bullets doesn’t mean I had a worse time with them – just that I used them for longer or have a more complex rationale for not using them. Italics indicate the final straw.

Acme

• Crashes cause data loss unless files are saved manually.
• It’s not possible to change text styles.
• New features are no longer being accepted for the editor.
• Line wrapping is not sensitive to word boundaries.
• It’s difficult to use with a trackpad, and I typically write for fun on a laptop.
• Live resize is not supported – the screen’s contents just stretch and only redraw when the resize ends.

BBEdit

• It lacks support for bold, italics, or background colors in themes, which makes editing Markdown unpleasant.
• Scrolling is discretized on lines, like a terminal program.
• The preferences are not organized well.
• Browsing files like notes leaves a trail of currently open documents in the sidebar. It would be better if only files that were modified were marked as open, like Nova’s italicized tab to temporarily view files.
• Lines only break at whitespace, instead of logical points like punctuation or symbols, leading to a difficult reading environment for inline links in Markdown.

Atom

• Editing felt a little sluggish.
• I couldn’t find a theme that I liked and the UI felt a bit alien on macOS.

SubEthaEdit

• Lacks a file browser and an open quickly palette.

Textmate

• Has an uncertain future and plugin development has petered out.
• Default color schemes aren’t to my taste.
• No Rust LSP plugin.

Vim

• Despite using vim for a decade, holding the archaic movement and editing commands became too cumbersome for my flow.
• I know enough Vimscript to be dangerous and had a predilection for endlessly tinkering with the editor.
• I couldn’t find a suitable GUI version for macOS and lost interest in using a TTY for an increasingly-complex interface.

VSCode

• The UI used too many Windows-derived elements and didn’t feel like it fit in with macOS.