One of the reasons for the Web’s triumph over the Gophernet in the early 90s is its superior organisational structure. Hypertext links allow any one page to be linked from any other page without regard for hierarchy or location, but you can still define hierarchy and location like you would in a filesystem. Early on, in 1994, Ward Cunningham invented the wiki, a sort of mini-web that leveraged the associative power of hypertext linking within a single website. This was good, and it paved...
I spend a lot of my time working with text in some way, whether it be writing, programming, reading, making notes, or running terminal commands. Because of this, I consider my text editor my most essential tool. Previously, I wrote on writing software, and while this post on text editors will doubtless overlap in some ways with that, I consider the two areas – that of writing and that of text editing – distinct in a few important ways.
The most obvious difference between writing and text editing is, in...
