Text editor koan.

February 19, 2010 11:41 AM

Looking for the full text to one of those Unix/nerd koans. This one is about text editors. All I've able to find from a half hour of googling is the "punchline" - on someones .sig on a bunch of mailing lists.

The ending: So the master hit the novice upside the head with the back of his hand. "Why did you do that!?" "I do not want to have to learn another editor." And the student was enlightened.

In the sig file it is attributed to one Larry Colen.

posted by [@I][:+:][@I] to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Once a user went to the administrator and asked him: “I want to write code. I have heard about emacs, vi, joe, pico — please give me the best text editor available!”

“Every editor is the best one”, replied the administrator, “you can’t find any editor which is not the best.”

Upon hearing this, the user was enlighted.

from here

Not quite the same, but possibly related.
posted by 256 at 11:57 AM on February 19, 2010

I'm pretty sure this is what you're looking for. It starts at the bottom of page 5 and goes on to page 6. There's a citation to The Zen of Programming, for which there is unfortunately no preview available.
posted by valkyryn at 12:03 PM on February 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

This looked SO familiar to me. It sounded like the punchline to one of the Unix Koans of Master Foo (edited by ESR). The quoted text isn't in any of those koans, though.

I did some searching on the old Usenet archives and I suspect the "source" for the attribution to Larry Colen is the following post to alt.peeves:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.peeves/msg/fd2f176b01ebc551
posted by QuantumMeruit at 12:11 PM on February 19, 2010

Thanks, valkyrn. That had the exact wording, and I found the whole thing here.
posted by [@I][:+:][@I] at 12:59 PM on February 19, 2010