Perl is in an interesting position today. It is no longer the language that every system administrator or text-processing enthusiast is expected to know, yet many of the ideas we take for granted today—powerful regular expressions, concise text transformations, one-liners, and “glue” programming—owe a great deal to Perl. Rather than asking whether it is obsolete, perhaps the better question is: what role does Perl play in the modern textsmith’s toolbox?

Most programming books begin with variables, loops, and functions. A textsmith, however, encounters programming from the opposite direction: composition. Before writing a single if statement, they are already composing grep, sort, awk, sed, pandoc, and dozens of other tools into something larger. By the time they sit down to learn a programming language, they have already been programming—they simply didn’t call it that.

Before Visual Studio Code arrived, the programming world was already crowded with editors. There was Vim for those who loved the keyboard, Emacs for those who wanted an editor that could become an operating system, Sublime Text for speed, Atom for hackability, Notepad++ on Windows, and countless IDEs for specific languages.

How does one become a programmer? Based on my own experience, this is all about agency—the moment you stop waiting for software to exist and start creating software that fits your own way of working. The key is discovering that if configuration isn’t enough, you can write the missing tool yourself.

For a long time, it semed to be a taboo to talk positively about emacs and vim in the same sentence. In this post, I am going to show why I love and use both of these traditional Unix text editors on a daily basis.