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Why I Use Antimacs
By way of introduction, Antimacs is a text editor. No more, no less. It doesn’t try to cram in features, nor does it succumb to the temptation to stray away from its purpose. It edits files, and that’s all that it does.
There’s no way to write email in Antimacs, nor can you play tetris. You certainly can’t chat with an AI psychoanalyst1. That would just be feature bloat.
Antimacs is written from ground up in straight C. This may sound limiting, development-wise, but it’s extensible in Lua. There’s a Textmate-style file pane plugin available, and one that lets you open up a Lua console.
Of course, these plugins only have access to a limited API. This prevents the security issue found in some other text editors where a plugin is able to do anything the user can.
One of the things I’m most fond of in Antimacs is its innovative Single Document Interface. It maximizes the amount of screen real estate taken up by a single document at a given time by refusing to partition the window at all. The current document gets all the space.
This allows you to see at a glance how much whitespace is available in your document, and makes it much easier to write those wonderful six-deep nested if statements. Most importantly, it lets you ignore superfluous details from other documents, like header definitions and documentation.
Antimacs also has great support for editing all sorts of different languages. The great thing is that it doesn’t get in your way. It just highlights the syntax and lets you do your coding. It doesn’t try to dictate your indentation, nor does it break expectations by considering different things “words” in different languages.
This simplicity also makes it easy to create new language modes. These are naturally specified in an XML format, for portability and ease of writing.
Moreover, you don’t have to go to the hassle of writing out syntax definitions in a full-blown programming language like Lua. Besides, why would you need to if you’re just highlighting?
I think the single thing that most contributes to my editing productivity is Anitmacs’ explicitness. There’s nothing cryptic about how to do simple tasks; I’ve never once had to consult the guide2 to figure out how to do something.
Everything is available through the menu. Of course the common operations are bound to shortcut keys; Control+C is copy, Control+O is open, etc. But most stuff is only available the clear, easily-discoverable way.
By way of example, just the other day I had a chunk of code I needed to comment out. Did I have to plunk around on the keyboard until I figured out exactly how to comment the selected text?
No! I just went to the menu, selected Insert, selected Comments, and selected “Comment Selection.”
Not only was this easy as pie, it got my hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. This sort of thing offers a great little break from coding, and also helps avoid repetitive stress injuries.
Well, I could just go on and on about Antimacs, but I’m getting tired so I’ll leave it at that. Good thing, too; I’m getting aggravated by the Mozilla text box interface, and it would be crazy to try to write a blog from Antimacs.
In the style of Emacs antinews. They’re better at this than I.
1 If you could, though, it would be based on a program written by my grandfather.
2 The guide is available only online, of course. It would be terrible to clutter up the Antimacs UI by sticking the documentation in the program itelf.
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Could you give us a link to antimacs homepage?
This post was a satire… there is no such thing as “Antimacs.” I’m riffing on the idea of Emacs “antinews,” where all the premise is that you’re upgrading from Emacs n_ to Emacs _n – 1 instead of the reverse, and it presents all the new features in a humorous inverted manner. This post was similar in that the premise is that I’m playing up the features of “Antimacs,” a fictional editor designed to be entirely the opposite of emacs.
If you’re looking for something like Antimacs, I’d suggest Gedit for Linux, TextEdit for OSX, or Notepad for Windows.
I agree, Gedit rocks!
I actually thought the editor you described sounded great.
As do many people, apparently; I doubt the popularity of similar text editors is due entirely to a lack of exposure to editors like Emacs. There are definite upsides to simplicity and a relative lack of power.
Maybe sometime I’ll do a more straightforward explanation of why I use Emacs. It isn’t for everyone, but there are definite benefits to using it that I guess I didn’t do a great job of showing with this post.