2026-07-10 TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker. One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool’s shortcomings and reselling them as a “puzzle game” which is “fun” to solve. I don’t want my tools to be “fun”. I want my tools to be invisible . Text Editor Wars Let’s take vim as an example  This is just an example, and applies to other editors too. . I constantly see some people praise it not for what actually makes it good, but by taking the things it’s bad at and turning them into a puzzle to have “fun” solving. I’ve had people tell me how “fun” it was to build a macro to handle some one-off text-refactoring problem. But when I looked at what they were doing and how long it took, my honest reaction was: I could have done that in Sublime in a minute with multiple cursors, or just written a quick script. To be clear, I’m not saying text editors don’t matter to your workflow.…