On the design of text editors
This work addresses the problem of understanding design inertia in developer tools, but it is incremental as it focuses on characterization rather than proposing new solutions.
The paper investigates the implicit design choices in text editors for developers, characterizing these defaults and illustrating alternative options without advocating for specific ones.
Text editors are written by and for developers. They come with a large set of default and implicit choices in terms of layout, typography, colorization and interaction that hardly change from one editor to the other. It is not clear if these implicit choices derive from the ignorance of alternatives or if they derive from developers' habits, reproducing what they are used to. The goal of this article is to characterize these implicit choices and to illustrate what are some alternatives without prescribing one or the other.