What do I want today in a text editor

2026-06-23

I have been an emacs and sometimes a vi/vim user from around 1998, I stopped usi ng emacs sometime due to RSI around 2008, and kept using vi at work as we just used terminal emulators to connect to a Linux machine where the compilers and co de were. I always missed the extensibility of emacs and how easy was to automate tasks ma de it, but vi was good enough to get the job done.

Then by 2010 I saved enough money to buy a Kinesis Advantage keyboard and that m ade a world of difference, so much that I considered again going back to Emacs. Now I started to program in elisp and I started automating a lot of mundane task s, around the mainframe like JCL execution, log job parsing and CICS abend analy sis that I realized that I should just bought the keyboard sooner, along with ta king seriously elisp as a tool.

So for me an editor needs to have language in which we could configure it or ext end its capabilities. That language must be small, so we don’t spend too much time learning how to work with it. Also the keybindings are important, the ability to create new more ergonomic mappings is just a must for me.

Tired on fighting with a never ending init.el, literate configuration file usi ng org mode and with the mess that the neovim jungle has to offer, I tried first searching for an editor without plugins, and with vi keybindings (keep RSI away), I found nvi, nvi2, then finally vis, which had a lua plugin system. I already know a little Scheme as it is a minimal language, I prefer it instead of Lua. So I thought why no give it the try and take vis as a base for something new.