If you’re like me, you’ve heard everything about every text editor. If there’s one thing developers love to do more than bike-shedding about things nobody will ever use, it’s bike-shedding about things we use every day. “Anything you can do in Emacs, you can do in Vim with less finger pain,” somebody once said. “Ah, but Emacs could have an IRC client in it,” the other guy replied, and now look. Look what happened.

Leaving aside the Big Two editors for a moment, it’s genuinely difficult to find something satisfying to work with for larger projects where you may need to jump around files and references rapidly. I’ve heard that I should use Atom, which is now practically dead in the water and tends to lag. Sublime is only useful if you don’t know Emacs or Vim yet. And God help you if somebody tells you to use an IDE before you’re experienced enough to know what you're doing - did you know Eclipse users fail interviews more frequently than any other single group of editor users?

One engineer I know uses LightTable with a zillion customizations, many of which he’s written himself. Watching him code is painful in the same way that watching a child prodigy play violin brilliantly is painful - the knowledge that you will never have that level of technical skill. But perhaps that’s what LightTable is: an editor for mad geniuses and the rest of us brainlets need something that takes care of the hard stuff and sensitive edge decisions. Something to help us avoid thinking too much and just get to coding. Something that looks good, feels good, plays nice with complexity, supports lots of extensions, and won’t randomly die one day because it’s mysteriously funded by a shadowy and unaccountable corporation.