Perhaps Sublime Text is Beorn's Carrock?

January 18, 2014 1:10 PM

Text Editors in The Lord of The Rings
Emacs: Fangorn

Vast, ancient, gnarled and mostly impenetrable, tended by a small band of shepherds old as the world itself, under the command of their leader, Neckbeard. They possess unbelievable strength, are infuriatingly slow, and their land is entirely devoid of women. It takes forever to say anything in their strange, rumbling language.

posted by jenkinsEar (40 comments total)

I'm pretty sure Eclipse is Mirkwood. Vast, contorted and mysterious, with good at its heart, but an alien good that serves its own purposes, keeps its own counsel and has little empathy for you.
posted by George_Spiggott at 1:14 PM on January 18, 2014 [9 favorites]

(Also, things live in it. You may not like them.)
posted by George_Spiggott at 1:16 PM on January 18, 2014 [5 favorites]

Pico must be Bree.
posted by jquinby at 1:37 PM on January 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

Visual Studio is The Ring: mysterious and unfathomably powerful, it eventually corrupts everything it touches.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 1:41 PM on January 18, 2014 [7 favorites]

jquinby raises a good point - Pico/Nano doesn't have all the pastoral comfort and safety of the Shire's GUI, but it's nevertheless a comfortable, welcoming place.

Regarding the post title, I suppose it makes sense if you look at snippets as sheep that come bearing bread and honey. Which I will, forevermore.
posted by The Gaffer at 1:50 PM on January 18, 2014

The vi entry is EXACTLY RIGHT
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 2:01 PM on January 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

I guess Joe's Own Editor is the Dead Marshes.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:19 PM on January 18, 2014

Sublime?
posted by weston at 2:23 PM on January 18, 2014

Sublime Text is the rebuilt Dale after Smaug roasted the first, Textmate version of it.
posted by fatbird at 2:38 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is more accurate than I wanted it to be.
posted by ardgedee at 2:40 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

I want to put notepad.exe in here but I don't remember a prefabricated utility shed sitting in a dirt lot in anywhere in Middle Earth.
posted by George_Spiggott at 2:44 PM on January 18, 2014 [24 favorites]

VIM is Gandalf's staff: a seemingly useless stick that allows the correct user to wield massive power.
posted by double block and bleed at 3:10 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

gedit is...... One of those places on the map that never really gets mentioned in the text, but where you imagine people are just living blissfully unaware of the massive conflict just down the road.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:29 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Word is a word processor, Einsteins. And the best one.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 3:33 PM on January 18, 2014

Sublime Text is the undying lands.
posted by jeffamaphone at 3:45 PM on January 18, 2014

WordPerfect 5.1 is one of those super happy places from the Silmarillion that was destroyed in the first age and now nobody can go back there, but really old people remember its glory.
posted by jeffamaphone at 3:46 PM on January 18, 2014 [10 favorites]

I want to put notepad.exe in here but I don't remember a prefabricated utility shed sitting in a dirt lot in anywhere in Middle Earth.

That sounds like Edoras to me, but maybe notepad is Helm's Deep: a place of last resort you're lucky to get out of alive.

Now I'm thinking Gandalf is Cygwin.
posted by bleep-blop at 3:48 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Notepad was a testbed for the edit control. No need to classify it. But Notepad++, where shall that go?
posted by jeffamaphone at 3:52 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Heh, vi is metaphorically Moria and literally Nethack.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:53 PM on January 18, 2014 [7 favorites]

That sounds like Edoras to me,

I thought that was a "thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs." An editor like that would suit me really well.
posted by George_Spiggott at 3:55 PM on January 18, 2014

Presumably in this scheme ed is Tom Bombadil.

Exactly.

He calls himself the "Eldest" and the "Master". He claims to remember "the first raindrop and the first acorn", and "knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless — before the Dark Lord came from Outside".
posted by jim in austin at 4:01 PM on January 18, 2014 [4 favorites]

BBEdit forever.
posted by schwa at 4:15 PM on January 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

Sublime Text is Dol Amroth, coming late in the game but incredibly helpful. (Though I may be too full of New Relationship Energy with it.)

Word is a horrible, bloated sack of protoplasm, as our own cstross has illustrated.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 4:15 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

jeffamaphone: WordPerfect 5.1 is one of those super happy places from the Silmarillion that was destroyed in the first age and now nobody can go back there, but really old people remember its glory.

The willow-meads of Tasarinan!
posted by tavella at 4:39 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Word:There agelong she had dwelt, an evil thing in spider-form, even such as once of old had lived in the Land of the Elves in the West that is now under the Sea, such as Beren fought in the Mountains of Terror in Doriath, and so came to Lúthien upon the green sward amid the hemlocks in the moonlight long ago. How Shelob came there, flying from ruin, no tale tells, for out of the Dark Years few tales have come. But still she was there, who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness. Far and wide her lesser broods, bastards of the miserable mates, her own offspring, that she slew, spread from glen to glen, from the Ephel Dúath to the eastern hills, to Dol Guldur and the fastnesses of Mirkwood. But none could rival her, Shelob the Great, last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:57 PM on January 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

"Pico must be Bree."

Back in the day, I half-shamefully, half-proudly refused to use vi and would compile Pico, if necessary. But I'd also use JOE, too.

I'd not before seen that quote archived on bash.org:

everyone's first vi session. ^C^C^X^X^X^XquitqQ!qdammit[esc]qwertyuiopasdfghjkl;:xwhat

...but it's pretty great.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:06 PM on January 18, 2014

I'm a woman who uses emacs.

(I might be the only one.)
posted by nev at 7:44 PM on January 18, 2014 [4 favorites]

As a BBedit user for more years than I care to remember, being compared to the Shire is very accurate. I recently switched to Sublime Text 2 and had to remake all my Clippings as Snippets. But guess what, with multiple cursor points, this brand new world was opened up!

So Sublime Text 2 would be Rivendell for me...
posted by greenhornet at 8:06 PM on January 18, 2014

Heh, vi is metaphorically Moria and literally Nethack.

Yeah, I've always called vi a trainer for Nethack.
posted by lkc at 9:05 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm working in Notepad++ tonight largely because I feel guilty on my endless Sublime Text trial. The free MSWin editors strike me as a case of ugly and mom dresses them funny compared to TextWrangler (which I use at work.) Word is certainly evil.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:30 PM on January 18, 2014

Word should be that jacked octopus thing that tries to drag them under and makes Moria look good by comparison.
posted by theredpen at 9:52 PM on January 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

gedit = Peter Jackson movies?
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 4:24 AM on January 19, 2014

It looks like you are attempting to find the One Ring, that you lost many years ago to the great weakening of your power.

Would you like help?

• Get help finding the One Ring
• Just find the One Ring without help

[] Don't show me this tip again.
posted by cromagnon at 8:02 AM on January 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm a woman who uses emacs.

(I might be the only one.)

It truly is A Guy Thing.
posted by tommasz at 10:42 AM on January 19, 2014

Word might be bloated etc etc but it's still leagues ahead of the competition, most of which look like 1995 shareware.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 10:49 AM on January 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Probably fueling a derail by saying this, but the thing that cracked me up about Word is that well into the late aughts -- the last time I was forced to use it on a regular basis -- it was still possible in normal use to get it into a state where the visible cursor and the actual text insertion point when you typed were in two different places in the document. A word processor that still can't even reliably get that right after 20 or more years is in the wrong business.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:38 AM on January 19, 2014

I think the most ridiculous part of MSWord for me is that it's entirely possible to have big blocks of text given the Heading 1 style that have the same typography and spacing as body text paragraphs, and possible to have body text paragraphs that look just like a heading but are not given the Heading tag.

Resulting in endless confusion when you try to move that text into a system that actually understands what semantic style markup is supposed to do. (That, and it's possible to apply block styles to single characters.)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:24 PM on January 19, 2014

Word might be bloated etc etc but it's still leagues ahead of the competition, most of which look like 1995 shareware.

How is that worse than the Lovecraftian nightmare that Word has become? Trying to find something in the "ribbon" is enough to drive a mortal insane.
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 12:56 PM on January 19, 2014 [4 favorites]

For what it's worth, Mac Word is still pretty good and usable.
posted by uberchet at 4:03 PM on January 21, 2014

> Word might be bloated etc etc but it's still leagues ahead of the competition, most of which look like 1995 shareware.

Possibly, then, 1995 was the pinnacle of text editor design.

Not that I'd use Word for code editing, which is the subject of the FPP. That would be like using a Hummer H2 to drive nails through lumber.
posted by ardgedee at 3:53 AM on January 22, 2014